


Seraph

by Snickfic



Series: Seraphverse [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Mpreg, Pregnancy, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-30
Updated: 2009-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-05 12:36:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 67,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/41777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It started with the heat. He noticed it just days after he broke out, a hot bullet deep in the pit of his stomach. It came to him that the soldier boys had done something more to him than strip away his entire vampiric existence, but he decided, a bit desperately, that he didn't mind the heat so long as that was all it was.</i></p><p>Spike-Dawn friendship fic with much Scooby intervention, occasional Slayer heroics, and one or two heart-to-hearts with Joyce Summers. Mpreg.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It started with the heat. He noticed it just days after he broke out, a hot bullet deep in the pit of his stomach. It came to him that the soldier boys had done something more to him than strip away his entire vampiric existence, but he decided, a bit desperately, that he didn't mind the heat so long as that was all it was.

Then came the hangovers like he'd never had since he was turned, maybe not before then, retching and cramps so sharp they clenched him into a fetal knot until they passed.

Breath was a tool, a thing he used for smoking or speech or emphasis, but now when he went too long without any of those things he started feeling breath_less_. He tried just not breathing, but eventually his lungs always pulled in hitching gasps of air whether he willed or no.

He'd been free two months when the moth began flapping its wings in his belly, rapid but ever so gentle, basking in the heat of his mysterious fire. It was so faint he doubted anyone could have felt it that wasn't already dead. He'd have blamed it on too much Jack and not enough blood, except he'd been avoiding the Jack these days. Maybe it was just the 'not enough blood' part, which would make sense, since he felt like he was hollowing from the inside out. Before the chip he'd never noticed how often he was hungry.

He'd thought vamps didn't gain weight, but then, he'd never known a vamp to try to subsist on pigs' blood before. He scavanged looser jeans and hoped it'd level off soon. He wondered about Angel, but only once did he consider calling to ask.

But today he knew. Today as he bent to lace up his Docs, he felt it, down there with the heat and the flutter: a ripple, a pebble sinking to the bottom of a pond. With a sudden stark clarity he realized what the soldier boys and their pet labcoats had done to him. It took two nerve-steadying breaths before the words followed.

They'd knocked him up.

~*~*~

He screamed oaths from every plot of land he'd ever prowled that had had the pretense to call itself a country, he drop-kicked the television (already broken by the soldier boys and not yet replaced) into the wall, he stomped the last remains of Mrs. Ethel Trawley to splinters, and all the while underneath the rage the revulsion, slimy and cold, crept like a cohort of slugs up his spine. Finally, when the same punch fractured a knuckle and put a crack in the sarcophagus lid, he paused to look around his broken crypt. He'd long since run out of curses and the wordless yelling had started to turn his throat sore. For a moment he just stood there, cradling his hand, and then he slumped to the floor and considered.

He was _not_ panicking. There was nothing to panic about. None of the demon doctors he'd consulted about the chip could guarantee against brain damage, but this was not that. This was soft-tissue surgery, down where a few nicks in long-dead organs wouldn't hurt anything. Compared to the chip, this was simple.

And it could be he was wrong. They could have stuck anything in him, secret government scientists that they were--some kind of monitoring system, or a bomb (nope, don't think about that, that was _not_ a preferable alternative), or... well, they were the bloody government, weren't they? Could be he was now relaying signals from nameless numbered federal agents buried in the Mafia. That would be the, um, L.A. branch?

Sod it. Whatever it was, it was fixable.

He got up and burrowed beneath the shattered remains of the television. Eventually he found the list of demony medical experts that he'd gotten from the Rolodex demon down at Willy's--not that anyone called her that to her face, of course. He let his finger fall on a name--Kthboui'ull Mo'ullrnrl, Kurelli, general surgery--and then at dusk he shrugged into his duster, found a payphone, and made the call. Preliminary exam next week, the receptionist said, and took his information.

Those labcoats thought they were going to stick whatever-it-was into him, did they? Thought they had themselves a cowed little lab-vamp to do with as they pleased? Chipped he might be, but fangless he was not. Whatever perverse experiment they'd meant to do, he was going to personally smash it to bits.

Spike sauntered away from the phonebooth feeling obscurely pleased. Not panicking at all.

~*~*~

The night of, he found himself at the Bronze, standing just far enough from the bar to keep from catching the bartender's eye, and wishing he dared some pre-appointment liquid fortification. Finally the certain hangover--from one sodding piss-thin American beer, how wrong was that?--decided him against it.

Spike wondered later who had gone with him to see the Kurelli. Had he asked the demon girl along after she'd stomped out of the phone booth, complaining to all and sundry about Harris ditching her to kill Shavroc demons with the Slayer? Had he gone alone? It ought to have made a difference, he felt. It seemed to him that every event in those early days had been precision-balanced, that with any deviation at all he would have made a different choice, a series of choices that would have changed everything.

But later, it was Dawn he remembered inviting along on a ride to the pit of sin and celluloid. As he turned to leave the Bronze he noticed her standing in a corner near the door, hugging herself and darting glances towards the dance floor with a wallflower's studied nonchalance. And then a glance darted to him and the shoulders drew a little tighter and then... _relaxed_. Before Spike could take offense at that, she was halfway to him.

"Hi, Spike." Bright and too casual. And what was she wearing? There was more of her out than in--she was just asking for a nibble, or more.

"Late for edible niblets to be running about, isn't it?" He gave her jugular a judicious leer.

A pause, while she decided whether she was offended by the description or scared of the leer or both. Then, "I'm supposed to be staying at Janice's because Mom's in San Francisco. But Janice said we could pick up high school boys here if, you know, we dressed right."

"And?" Spike wasn't sure why he was asking, except perhaps to wonder at the rank stupidity of high school boys not to have plucked this plum already, ripe or not.

She eyed the concrete, flushing. "And Janice did. I guess she's better at the dressing than I am. Or maybe it was the sparkly eyeshadow?"

"So she ditched you. What are you hanging around here for? Go home." Get rid of the sodding face paint; you haven't got the attitude to carry it off.

"I'm not supposed to spend the night by myself." She grimaced even as she said it. "Mom thinks I'm five."

"And you're supposed to be here, swinging your skinny ass and talking to vampires? Slayer'd love that, I'm sure." He shook his head and took a step for the door.

"Where are you going?" she said.

He gave her a hard, suspicious look: that question had sounded almost hopeful. "I, who am a grown vampire and allowed to stay out after dark, have business to take care of." Which reminded him why he was here in the first place and where he was going. Making cutting remarks to the Slayer's kid sister--not that he'd gotten around to making any yet--suddenly lost its flavor. After another once-over, he said, "You want to come?"

And so as he drove into L.A., there she was, perched on the DeSoto's bench seat and regaling him with tales of teenybopper derring-do. He'd long since decided that the Janice bird was useless for anything but draining. Then Dawn asked him about his 'business,' and he hedged, and played the 'private' card twice, and finally he said, "S'a demony doctor. Need some work done."

"Oh. You mean the chip."

"No, I--" He gave her a glance. "Yeah. Seein' about the chip." It was as good an excuse as any.

"Buffy'll try and stake you again."

"Yeah, well, don't need to give her the chance. Won't be any need for sticking around, will there?" He'd spent bits and pieces of the worst two and a half years in his recent unlife in SunnyHell, and he couldn't now remember why he'd stuck around so long. Oh, right. Dru, wheelchair, gem, chip. And now this.

In the reception area, Dawn shrunk against him as the Kurelli came out to meet them. It had four leg-tentacles, four arm-tentacles, and four eyes all radially distributed around a velvety blue trunk, and it went by the name Steven Marie. "Your vocal chords are not capable of reproducing the sounds of my given name," it said in a burbling voice, proffering a tentacle first to Spike, then to Dawn to shake. Dawn took it tentatively and gave the demon an uncertain smile.

"Don't go staking the secretary while I'm gone," Spike told her. He left her looking over the magazines and followed the Kurelli into a labyrinth of offices and hallways to an exam room as impersonally sterile as any Spike had seen while sneaking blood from Sunnydale General.

After gesturing Spike onto the bench, the Kurelli said, "Now, what is your complaint?"

"My complaint? Sodding government electrocuted me, stuck a bloody chip up my brain, and, and…" He gestured vaguely. "And they did this to me. That's my complaint."

"I mean, what are your symptoms?"

"Oh. Right." And he listed them all: the weight gain and the hunger, the hangovers, the heat, the breathlessness, the staccato trembling in his gut, and the bit of a tickle that had finally decided him on this glorified corpse inspection.

Steven Marie prodded and poked for a while. Then it brought out the ultrasound, which Spike nearly walked out on, placated only by the Kurelli's utter lack of fluster. "Judging from your descriptions of the laboratory, any number of invasive procedures may have caused these symptoms," it said as it slathered jelly across Spike's bare stomach. "Even if it _is_ a parasite, there's no reason that it need be human."

"Dunno if I feel better or worse about that," Spike mumbled.

The Kurelli peered at the display with one and then another of its eyes and burbled to itself. Finally it flicked the screen around. "It looks like you were right. You have a humanoid embryo enclosed in some kind of protective sac in your abdomen. I'd guess the sac is functioning as a form of artificial womb, as well as an interface between the parasite's biology and yours."

He stared at the ghostly white image on the screen, familiar from scenes in a dozen different soaps. "I don't _have_ biology. I'm _dead_. Gave up on Bios when I gave up breathing"--not that that last was strictly true anymore.

The curled form was misshapen, warped, yet he almost thought he could see a profile in the wisps of light. Unthinking, he reached toward his stomach and grimaced as jelly stuck to his fingers.

"Your human referents are not useful in this case," the Kurelli said. "Blood sustains you as food, water, sleep, heat, and respiration sustain humans. It seems likely that the sac transforms the blood you ingest into the parasite's sustenance."

"It's human, then?" He couldn't tell which answer it was he was hoping for, much less what difference it made.

"It appears so, but I can't be certain at this point."

"What do you mean 'at this point'? What else do you need?"

The Kurelli shifted a pair of tentacles in what might have been a shrug. "I can't tell from the image alone. It could be any number of species, natural or supernatural. It could be a gorilla fetus for all I can tell. I could remove the sac and run some tests on the remains--" It paused when Spike jerked his head up, then continued, "Or I could attempt exploratory surgery. However, I have no reason to think that the sac, once breached, would continue to function, and even basic human prenatal screening procedures involve piercing the uterus."

"So you're saying if I want to find out what it is, I have to kill it."

"Most likely." The Kurelli began wiping the jelly away with a paper towel.

"That mean it's alive?"

"You may consider yourself a dead human, but you're a live vampire--you are, shall we say, differently animated. And yes, the parasite appears to be at least as alive as you are.

"Now, if you want it removed, we can schedule an appointment for the surgery."

"Or...?"

"Or if you wish to continue hosting it, I can refer you to a specialist in symbiotic and parasitic health."

"Uh huh." Because he _wanted_ to play host to a government experiment that'd been stuck in him without so much as a hope-you-don't-mind. "What about, you know, a bit of mojo? Couldn't you just magic it out?"

The Kurelli contrived to stare at him out of three of its four eyes. "I am in the medical profession, vampire. I give medical opinions only."

"But--"

"I doubt it would help you. _You_ are supernatural, but this is medicine, and interaction between the two is unpredictable at best."

"Right." Spike regarded the slight curve of his belly, barely noticeable except that in a hundred and twenty years of stasis, it had never been curved before. "Well, then. Want it out."

"If you'll speak to my assistant as you leave, she'll make an appointment for the surgery."

~*~*~

Dawn dropped a back issue of _Demonic Herb and Health_ onto the table--weird, but way more interesting than the stupid home decorating magazines they had at the dentist's--and followed Spike out the door. "So, what did he say about the chip?"

"The chip?" Spike glanced back at her, brow knit in an expression half-puzzled, half-somewhere-else-altogether. "Right. Said I need to come back in a couple of weeks. Gonna cut me open."

"Oh." A pause, and then--"Do you want me to come with you?"

Now he stopped and turned to face her, his head cocked in that way that assured her she had his full attention. But all he said was, "What's that, love?"

Now she was all nervous, which was stupid, because it was just Spike. Who was totally bad boy hot, with a record that'd make any human poser wet his pants. Who kicked Buffy's butt for fun and then let her go just so he could do it again later.

Who was, she realized, still waiting for an answer. She flushed. "It's just, um, it's kind of scary getting surgery, you know? Like when I was seven and I got my tonsils out, and Mom kept telling me they weren't taking my voice out and I didn't believe her?" He hadn't changed expression yet. "I thought maybe you'd like someone to come with you." Which was, again, stupid, because Spike the bad boy vampire? Totally not scared. Of anything.

He was smiling now, just a little. "So you're serving yourself up as my post-chip appetizer, is that it? Thoughtful of you."

She hadn't even thought of that. Crap. "I-I'll come if you promise not to eat me. If you want me to. I'll tell Mom I'm staying with Janice--she'll cover for me. I'll tell her I have a date with this way older guy."

After a smirk he dropped his gaze and said, "Then, yeah. Wouldn't mind the company. Makes a bloke a little nervous, having folks taking knives to him."

"Promise you won't eat me."

"Cross my--well, rather not do that, and anyway I'm already dead."

"Promise?" She wasn't coming unless he did. No way.

"Yeah, Niblet. Promise."

And then Dawn could breathe again. He didn't think she had stupid ideas. He wasn't going to eat her. And really, it _was_ another trip to L.A. with a guy who totally smoked that pimply sophomore Janice had been rubbing up against at the Bronze.

Janice could eat her heart out.


	2. Chapter 2

Spike couldn't say, even to himself, exactly why he'd come to the Watcher's. Curiosity, he supposed. A whim. It took all the fun out of killing if you didn't know _what_ you were killing until you'd already done the deed.

He waited until the Scoobies had wandered resolutely off to whatever riotous kiddy fun was on schedule for the night. Buffy was the last, but finally she left, too, stake in hand, heading towards the nearest cemetary. Spike edged from behind his oak and marched himself across the street. Of the whole sodding lot of them, there was only one he'd have been less thrilled to explain this to than Giles.

The door was actually locked, for once. Spike banged on it. "Oi, Watcher! Need to talk to you." His vamp hearing picked up a shuffle coming down the stairs, and he gave the door another couple good raps for emphasis.

"Buffy, you needn't break the-- Spike." Giles eyed him with aggressive disinterest.

"The Spike's not broken, but thanks for caring." Spike slipped inside before Giles could block him. "Need a favor."

Giles sighed heavily and closed the door behind him. "Another tracking device removed? The use of my couch? My best scotch? I'm afraid the Giles Center for Useless Wastrels closes at sundown."

"That's discrimination," Spike said. He shucked the duster over the back of the couch and headed into the kitchen, because being still would mean talking. "Don't have any blood left over, do you?"

"You're interrupting my bedtime so that you can raid my refrigerator."

"Fridge is a bonus." Aha. There it was, one last bag. Good thing; just thinking about it had made him hungry again.

Giles stood at the kitchen doorway. "Either state your purpose or leave."

"Right." Spike edged past Giles. "Mind if I sit down?" He dropped onto the couch and tore open the bag with a fang. Cold, but he didn't care just then.

"What I _mind_ is that you are in my flat. Your location herein is secondary." The disinterest had yielded to an active glare.

"Told you, need a favor." The blood was disgusting stuff, all cold and syrupy going down his throat, and he _still_ couldn't be bothered to care.

"Which I shall greatly enjoy refusing you as soon as you tell me what it is."

Spike squeezed the last few globules from the bag and shook out of vamp face. "Look, I need a spell, all right? Something to tell humans from demons."

Giles gave a not entirely dignified snort. "You needn't a spell for that, Spike. I can assure you you are wholly demon."

"Not for me." Was there any way of putting this that wasn't sodding humiliating?

But he'd finally managed to catch the Watcher's attention. "Then who do you mean? Oh." The interest faded. "You want to know if the chip will fire when you hit someone."

"What? No." Although that didn't sound like such a bad idea, actually. "Something else." Giles huffed in impatience, and Spike hastened, "Look, those lab blokes, right? They didn't just shove a chip up my brain. They gave me a... parasite."

"You have tapeworms." Now Giles just looked revolted.

"No!" Spike leapt to his feet and saw Giles calculating the distance to the crossbow. "They gave me a baby!"

The look on the Watcher's face was almost worth it, Spike reflected. Utter incredulity. Off came the glasses, out came the handkerchief. Wait for it...

"Good Lord." There it was.

For the barest moment, Spike was enjoying himself.

"Are you certain?"

So much for that.

Spike slumped back onto the couch. "Saw the picture on the little black screen. Humanoid, the doc said, but he couldn't be more specific. Said it was medicine and the mojo wouldn't do me any good, but it seems to me you oughta at least be able to tell the _species_ of the thing."

"I-- yes, I imagine I could. You're right, the division between demon and human is quite well defined..." His voice trailed off as he begun taking books from the nearest bookshelf. While Giles mumbled to himself Spike stared down at his knuckles. So Giles wasn't Spike's fuzzy authority blanket, the way he was the Slayer's; he could still see the appeal of having someone to dump all the knottiest questions on. Any problem that couldn't be killed: 'Here, fix this,' and it'd be fixed.

"Here it is." Giles waved a book at him. "An incantation, a candle, I believe I have those herbs... Yes. Just a moment while I gather supplies."

"Sure I'm not keeping you from beddy-bye?"

Giles looked over at him vaguely. "Certainly not. Easily done, it won't take any time to prepare." He wandered upstairs and a few moments later he was back, hands full with oddments he set on the coffee table. "This will be a bit more complicated since the creature in question is contained within another creature--that's correct, isn't it?" Giles glanced up, half-startled, as though suddenly certain he'd misheard.

"Yeah, that's right. I need to strip?"

"No, that's quite all right. A little plant fiber should make no difference. Although I should be very curious to examine you--" For the first time, Giles really looked at him, eyes searching.

Spike hunched against his gaze. "Not here to satisfy your curiosity."

"Of course. Quite." Giles turned back to his preparations. After a few more minutes' puttering, he lit the candles, smeared a drop of the warmed wax on Spike's forehead, and muttered a few words to himself that the room's sudden static said were magick. Another minute, more words, the pungeant stink of burnt herbs, and then Giles held up the candle again. "As I hold the flame to your--ah, to your stomach--it _is_ your stomach?"

"Yeah."

"Then the flame should turn the color appropriate to the species of the--well. You understand."

"I understand you're wantin' to hold the flame right next to the flammable vampire!"

"Oh, hush, I'm not going to light you on fire. Come, stand here so I can get the proper angle."

Warily, Spike stood and edged towards Giles until he got the nod to stop, and then Giles held the candle a few inches from Spike and muttered a few last words. For a moment nothing happened, and then the flame spit sparks, flared a brilliant magenta, and snuffed out.

"Well," was all Giles said.

Spike settled shakily back onto the sofa. "What's the verdict? Demon, like dear old dad?"

Giles gave him a sharp look. "Human." He shook his head, rose, and went to the cabinet where the decanter was hidden. He knocked back a finger for himself, and then filled his glass and another and handed the second to Spike. Finally Giles sat at the table, still shaking his head.

Human. Well, that answered the question, didn't it? Not a face-sucker out of _Alien_\--a bit of a relief, that was, despite what he's seen on the screen. Not even some near-human thing with violet eyes or a forked tongue or a smidge of telepathy. Just human.

So now he knew.

"Those bloody idiots."

Spike glanced up to see Giles glowering at his scotch.

"They entrusted the wellbeing of a human embryo to a vampire. Those interfering self-absorbed idiotic _arses_. What did they think they were doing, using a _vampire_ as a surrogate? You're violent, you have filthy living habits... It violates every principle of decency, all experience in nature. It's criminally irresponsible. It's an abomination."

"The vampire's not so pleased about it, either." Spike slammed the untasted glass on the table and stood. "Just the chip was more than bloody enough, but this--"

"You'll have it terminated, I assume."

Spike stiffened against the Watcher's hard gaze. "Know a bloke in L.A."

"Of course." A tight, humorless smile. "It will be the first human life you've ended in quite some time."

"Yeah." Spike snatched at his duster and shoved his arms into the sleeves. "Appreciate the mojo. Got things to kill now."

He stalked out the door and down the street, opposite the direction the Slayer had gone--he had no interest in meeting up with her just now. He'd try the cemetaries first; there'd been a rumor at Willy's of a rising party at Woodridge tonight. If he couldn't find enough violence there, well, he could always go give Willy some.

And then he'd call Steven Marie and confirm his appointment. 'Abomination,' right. He'd get this abomination bloody _out of him_.


	3. Chapter 3

Dawn showed up at the crypt just before sunset. On the drive in she did exactly what he needed her to do: chatter about everything and nothing, filling up the silences during which he might have been tempted to think.

Then she was asking about plans, about unlife post-chip, and Spike spun a few fantasies for her benefit: another crack at stealing the Gem of Amara from Angel, a lazy life in the sun on one of those Caribbean islands that got lots of cruise ship tourists. "It'd be a bloody service to society, eating some of them. The crooked lawyers and the fat cat CEO's." She giggled at that, and he tried to think when the last time was that someone thought he was funny.

They got to the office a few minutes early. The lobby was empty; even the receptionist station was vacant. Dawn made a move towards the chairs and Spike held a hand out. "Wait." He sniffed. "Demon blood."

She gave him an are-you-stupid look. "It's a doctor's office."

"_Wait_." As he said it, shadows closed in from all sides. When the light hit the dark forms, they were in vamp face.

"Well, well," Spike said, calculating. "A bit of a pre-surgery brawl to get the tension out?" At least fifteen crowded around him and Dawn, and more pressed in behind those.

"_You_ are the abomination," spat the vamp at the front, a particularly ridgy character in a cloak.

"Yeah, heard that before." Dawn was edging up behind him. Can't get distracted, can't laugh about a mini-Scooby looking to _him_ for protection. Which, now that he thought about it, was more humiliating than it was funny.

"You dare stand and pretend _you_ bring the Miracle Child. You are a mockery to our grand and profane prophecy. You, you--" It waggled a shiny blade at him.

"At a loss for words, are you?"

"Kill him--and cut the child out first!"

"Bugger." Spike's face shifted as he launched himself at the robed vamp and got in one good kick and a nice knuckle-bruiser to the sod's jaw before he had arms wrapping around him from all sides, steadying him for a bit of do-it-themselves surgery via the shiny blade with the fancy scrollwork. He threw them off and let fly a flurry of punches. His demony doctor was probably dead and there'd no fixing his problem tonight, and he let the rage of these two facts fuel his fists, digging him deeper into the mass of ridged faces that seemed, in the tiny arena of the waiting room, to be unending.

"Spike!"

He turned to see two vamps piling on Dawn, fangs out. She was already bleeding from a gash on her arm and a shallow puncture at her neck.

She looked delicious.

She swung an awkward punch. The recipient grabbed the still-bleeding arm and bit again, and she screamed, "Spike!"

"Bloody hell." He shoved the vamps at his back against the crowd behind them and plunged forward, pushing the next vamp to the red-speckled carpet and grabbing Dawn's hand. "Had a nice chat, got to run now."

The vamps streamed after them, screaming oaths in a few ritual languages he knew and at least one that he didn't, but somehow he managed to keep himself and Dawn ahead of them. At the car he threw her in from the driver's side, ducked in, slammed the door shut on some vamp's fingers, and squealed tires revving out of the parking lot.

He jerked down onto a side street at first opportunity, then through an alley. Finally he got them onto the highway towards Sunnydale, bumping the speed limit but not pushing past it, since it wasn't like he could eat the guy handing out tickets anymore.   
A few moments after he'd stopped mumbling under his breath, Dawn said, "I'm bleeding," her voice a full octave higher than usual.

"You don't say," Spike said.

She glared at him. "You can't eat me. You promised. And you still have the chip."

"Right." He punched the dash, and she jumped. "Doesn't mean I don't want to. And I'm hungry." As usual, and not improved by the pre-surgery starvation. "Help if you bandaged yourself up a bit."

"I don't--"

He swerved off onto the curb, stopped the car, and twisted to rummage through the bottles and cassette tapes behind his seat until he found a couple of t-shirts. He tore them into strips and shoved them at her, and then he pushed out of the car, slammed the door, and kicked the fender. Then he kicked it a few more times for good measure.

"Spike?"

Startled, he snarled at her. She flinched, but she stood her ground. "I can't get this one on my arm."

"Bloody stupid bint," he mumbled, but he took the cloth strip, and then his attention got caught on the luscious salt-copper-iron-_blood_ smell wafting from the wound.

Dawn pulled away. "Never mind, I'll tie it myself. Pervert."

He growled and snatched her arm back. "Hold still." He wrapped the gash tight and rigged a kind of knot. "Got some lovely hemoglobin in you."

"Gee, what a charmer _you_ are."

Spike spun and kicked the fender again.

"Spike?" Her voice wavered. "Are you okay?"

"Bloody hell! I've still got this thing stuck in me, my doctor's gone sodding missing, and I just pulled out of a brilliant brawl so I could stand here smelling the Slayer's kid sis and not be able to eat her while she asks me stupid questions. What do you bloody think?"

She crossed her arms--gently--and didn't say anything. Finally, he kicked the fender one last time and got back in the car, and when she was in the other side they pulled back onto the road again.

After a few moments of silence, Dawn said, "They were waiting for you."

"Yeah." He couldn't quite figure that, unless the Kurelli had told them, though he hadn't been aware of vampicidal religious fanaticism as one of the standard Kurelli traits. Maybe that vamp receptionist had clued them in.

"Why would they care if you got the chip out? Were they, like, worried about the competition?"

"Was never about the chip."

"Then... what? I don't get it."

He'd had enough talking around the subject and he couldn't bring himself to actually _say_ it. He grabbed her hand and laid it against his stomach, and hoped the chit curled up in there would move so she could feel it and he wouldn't have to explain.   
Dawn snatched her hand back and scooted up against the passenger door. Catching her look, he snorted. "Oh, _now_ you're scared of the vamp. I'm exactly as terrifying as any horny bloke with a yen for the underaged. Brilliant."

When she didn't move, he sighed. "The military blokes? Wankers who shoved this chip up my brain?"

"Yeah," she said, voice flat.

"They knocked me up."

A pause. The brow furrowed. Finally, tentatively, "I know you're English and stuff, but here that means--"

"Yeah."

"Oh." Another pause. "Really? _Really?_"

"Yeah."

"Ew."

"Not disagreeing with you."

She unwedged herself from the door, and for a while she was mercifully silent. Eventually, the hand came sneaking back and flattened on his stomach, but apparently his parasite wasn't in the mood for action tonight. Or maybe it'd already gotten enough.

"So there's a baby in there."

"There bloody well is not! S'just a blob. S'nothing. And I'm going to get it out!"

"Oh." Her voice was very small.

Spike glared at her. "What now?"

She shrugged, and huddled in on herself. "It's just, you know, babies. They're kind of cute, and cuddly--"

"And tender."

"And it's not like you matter to anyone else. I mean, your girlfriends keep dumping you and Buffy's friends all hate you because you're a vampire and she says all the demons hate you because you beat up on them and now the vampires want to kill you because you're pregnant--"

He snarled.

"But you _like_ killing things, right?" Her voice hardened. "You're probably excited."

"What is it with you people? Women go around getting rid of babies all the time, and it's a hell of lot more natural with them than it is with me!"

"It's sad then, too."

"Well, cry me a bloody river."

She fell into a reproachful silence. Well, good. Daft bint needed some of those shimmery illusions stripped away, or the world would just eat her alive. Like it ate that silly ponce William.

Some time later, Dawn whispered, "I'm really cold."

"Turn the heater on."

When she didn't, he glanced over to see her slump slowly against the door. A dark line trickled down her arm from beneath the makeshift bandage, and he realized that the smell of blood, which he'd been carefully ignoring, had gotten stronger.

"C'mon, love, we're almost there. Wake up. There's a good Niblet." But she just fell sideways at his touch. Bloody _hell_. They were just rumbling into the suburbs outside Sunnydale proper; nowhere to stop, really.

He floored the gas. A few minutes later he hauled Dawn out of the car and carried her, head lolling, up to the Summers door. He gave the lock a sharp kick, pulled the door open, and laid Dawn on the couch.

Joyce stumbled down the darkened stairs. "What--Spike? Oh my God, Dawn. What have you done to her? You _bastard_!"

"Got herself scraped up a bit, needs some bandages and probably some fluids, too."

Joyce flipped on the lights, took the time for one dust-at-twenty paces glare, and strode off towards the kitchen. Meanwhile, Spike grabbed the blanket draping the back of the sofa and covered Dawn with it.

"Spike?" Dawn's eyes slitted open. "My head's all woozy."

Joyce pushed past him and knelt at Dawn's side. As she stripped the now-sodden t-shirt from Dawn's arm she said sharply, "These look like teeth marks."

"Got jumped by some vamps," Spike said.

"Friends of yours?" Her voice was ice.

"No, we _both_ got jumped."

"What was she even doing with you?"

"Um. Well."

"It was my idea, Mom."

Joyce pressed the disinfectant into the wound, and Dawn yelped. "_What_ was your idea?" Her voice had taken on a deadly momma-bear tone.

"Mom, nothing like that. Geez. Spike had an... errand, and I said I'd go with him."

"Dawn, what were you thinking, just running off like that?" She turned on Spike. "I cannot believe you let this happen to her. I'd like to--oh, I could stake you myself!"

"Mom, no, you can't! He's--" Dawn caught Spike's sharp look. "It wasn't his fault," she finished. "He saved me."

"Oh, no? If he hadn't taken you to wherever you went, he wouldn't have _had_ to save you."

"He didn't have to," Dawn said.

Joyce threw her hands up. "Wonderful. My daughter is running around who knows where in the middle of the night with a man who puts her in mortal danger and then has to _think about_ whether or not he's going to save her life."

But Dawn wasn't listening to her. Dawn was looking at him, her big blue eyes pensive, unafraid. "He didn't have to save me," she repeated, whisper-soft. From her expression this was an important thought, a revelation, and he chose not to consider what it might signify.

She wasn't so bad, he found himself thinking later, after he'd gotten to his crypt without further mishap and two bags of blood had improved his mood. It occurred to him that he ought to be appalled, admitting to affection for one of the warmbloods, but he dismissed the thought. It wasn't as though he'd ever followed those kinds of rules before. That vampirism had conventions and mores when it could have had anarchy was, in his opinion, its great absurdity. That stint under the Anointed One had been enough vamp social agenda to last him a human lifetime or two. No one would ever catch _him_ following some 'profane prophecy' about a vamp-borne sprog, even if it did lead to a lovely brawl.

A brawl that had kept him from getting rid of his stowaway. "Won yourself a reprieve, did you?" he said, and then growled when he realized who he was talking to.

Soon. This would all be over soon.


	4. Chapter 4

So it had been a week, and he hadn't gotten around yet to calling the next name on his list of medical references. No reason. He was short of cash, but that could always be fixed by hanging around downtown and fanging out at passers-by. He just hadn't gotten to it yet. The last time he'd tried, his mark had turned out to be the demon girl, and the ensuing haunted house hijinks--not to mention the aftereffects of the one beer he'd talked himself into--had put him out of sorts.

He was musing on this in between afternoon naps when his door swung open and something on the dinosaur end of dainty stumped in. Spike held his breath; it was too late to duck into the sarcophagus, and anyway he didn't want to. He hadn't had his bit of violence since turning tail on the vamp fanatics, hardly a satisfactory ending, and he was itching to pummel something. So he waited. When a swath of dry skin rustled just above his head, he shot a hand and gripped--an arm, pebbly-textured and thick. Yeah. This one, he could fight.

"From the sound of those massive mud flaps I'd peg you for a demon," he said, eyes closed. "Which means you're in for a world of... pain," he finished, staring up at a bloke that was big and solid and ugly as bugger all, a patchwork of demon parts all joined by huge shiny staples. Not what Spike would have called fashionable, not that most demons seemed to have any sense of fashion at all as far as he could tell.

"Spike," said the thing. "I want you to come with me."

"Do you?" Spike slid to his feet. "Let's go then." He feinted a step and then hauled off a punch to the gut that'd send the guy sprawling. Only it... didn't. The brute was still standing there, peering at Spike with that disinterested curiosity that must have been calculated to intimidate. "Ow."

"Come. You're going to help me with my problem."

This, he thought, was who the Slayer and her Slayerettes had been jittering about for weeks. He wasn't so sure he wasn't a bit jittery himself. Besides, the stink of so many demons concentrated in one skin was souring his stomach. "Why is that, exactly?"

"Because I'm going to help you with yours."

Which was just intriguing enough that Spike followed him to a dank hole-in-the-ground of a headquarters and listened to a spiel outlining mayhem on an impressive scale, even if the approach struck him as a bit clinical. Far be it from him to object to another demon's taste in violence. Take an army of humans and a vague alliance of demons, smash them together, and make a new army out of the pieces: it wasn't exactly an apocalypse--and he'd have known one if he saw it--but it was at least a middling-sized Armageddon. He started to think that, for the first time since he'd been zapped, something was looking up.

"And you want me," he said.

"You have connections to the Slayer. You can draw her into the battle."

And wasn't it always about the Slayer? The guy _said_ he'd heard about Spike's other Slayers--the dead ones--and he made noises like he was impressed with Spike's impotence-fueled vendetta against the local demon horde, but it really all came down to the fact that Spike had been stupid enough to get himself caught and then pathetic enough to ask for help from the _Slayer_, of all people.

"Not that all that doesn't sound amusing, but you said something about helping me with my problem, too, yeah? The chip?"

"I will remove the chip."

Spike blinked. "Just like that. I make sure the Slayer's down in the melee, you take out the chip."

"Just like that," said the thing, but the informality sounded stiff, almost threatening, in his deep oratorical delivery.

It was everything he wanted: the whole world laid at his feet again and some general butchery to welcome him back into it.

"And the other, too, yeah?" Spike asked, gesturing down at himself.

"You will be wholly restored," the guy said--intoned, was more like. "The chip that confines you will be removed, demolished. The unnatural growth in your stomach--unnatural even for you, a vampire, who glories in perverting the processes of nature--will be excised and destroyed." He paused, cocking his head at a rigid angle that turned the pose into a caricature. "I think I would like to dissect it."

_It will be the first human life you've ended in quite some time._

There was more maundering after that, something about a struggling flame and savagery and truths clung to, but Spike's attention kept slipping. He'd almost gotten used to the fluttering heartbeat, the knot of fire warming him--would he miss that, he wondered?--but anytime he held himself still, he noticed anew. As though it knew it had his attention, the thing kicked, feebly.

The demon-thing was on about plans now, things Spike ought to have been listening to, all the stars to be nudged into alignment so that Patches got his interesting casualties and Spike got his existence back. Something about the witch's dogboy and an unlikely rescue, although Spike couldn't keep track of what the purpose of said rescue was--something to do with Soldier Boy the First.

He pulled himself together long enough to mutter generic assent and get told the directions to the Initiative's back door, and then he pasted on his most amiable grin and scrambled down the caves' single sewer entrance.

Whatever in the mighty misbegotten's words had kicked Spike's thoughts into freefall, it wasn't the kind of thing that could be teased out with a little hard thinking--not that there were many things with him that could. He needed motion. He needed to hit things until it came to him, whatever it was.

He followed his feet to the sewer line beneath the clock tower where a clot of Klong beasts had collected, feeding off the residual mystical energy from that silence-making spell months before. Spike wrenched an iron bar from the sewer wall, slipped into his fangs, and plunged toward the middle of the slimy, grunting mass of Klong.

He could feel it creeping up on him, like a stealth epiphany.

He hacked at a tentacle swinging towards him, and got a faceful of steaming, rank Klong blood. Then he was kicking another tentacle away before it could trap him. He pushed towards the center of the flailing mass and stabbed the bar straight into the flat of the beastie's oh-so-tender forehead. It slumped.

It wasn't Patchwork Demon's words, 'unnatural' and 'perverting the processes of nature' and what not, because he'd had all the same thoughts himself, or most of them, anyway.

Another Klong oozed towards him, and he shoved aside the pincered arm to kick it in the nose once, twice, and then straight into the head: dead Klong.

It wasn't Dru, peering at him with fierce knowing gaze and telling him what Miss Edith saw in his future, 'beads of time black as soot, round as eyes sliding down the thread, _plop, plop, plop_.' Golden fishes again, and long wintry months with wheels instead of waltzes, and a mouse running pit-pat round his belly. 'The melons shall dance and the turnips shall sing opera,' she'd said, and then she'd given him that look that was half lust and half something older and darker and deeper than any sex they ever had.

It wasn't that, because he hadn't even thought of it in years, that one mad dazzling conversation out of thousands.

The two remaining Klongs were agitated now, both heaving towards him at once. One caught slimy hold of his arm, suckers sticking to the duster leather. He beat it back with a roar.

And it wasn't Dawn, her arms crossed and her blue eyes (all babies were born with blue eyes) shining out from under eyebrows pinched in reproach. It just wasn't.

Suddenly a tentacle struck him in the face and he was spitting bitter Klong ooze. He wrenched out of the grip and sunk his makeshift dagger into the unprotected forehead. Then he struck at the other beastie, pouring all the itching uncertainty into his punches until the thing's skull caved in.

_The first human life you've ended in quite some time._

Felt as though there ought to be some satisfaction in that, some sense of triumph over the human-shaped constructions of hypotheses and scalpels who'd stripped him of all but swagger.

There wasn't.

He slouched against the seeping sewer wall and started feeling for his cigarettes before remembering, just in time, the high flammability of Klong blood.

He wanted a Moment, an epiphany backed by a measured stack of hesitations and half-inclinations and reasoning that he could trace and explain to himself. He looked, after, and thought he might have found it in all those things he thought it wasn't: Dru's mouse and Dawn's blue eyes and, yes, the heat welling up in him that he hadn't known since he'd first felt fangs slide into his throat. Maybe.

Or maybe it was simply that he could _feel_ the life trembling in him. William had been a man of abstracts; he'd delighted in a line of logic or a pretty phrasing, and maybe he'd gotten his argument in somewhere along the way. But Spike lived/fought/_loved_ by fangs and cock and both hands, and it was Spike who relaxed against the tiny flutter within and said, "Looks like you'll be staying for a while yet, little one."


	5. Chapter 5

After the first decision--the one that kept resisting his attempts to frame it in terms of 'just' and 'only,' the one that had felt more like sediment settling in the back of his brain than any conscious choice on his part--after _that_, the next one seemed simple by comparison. He knew about the boy Adam had amused himself with; what the newswoman hadn't said, he'd heard passed along from the Gliv demon who mopped the hospital morgue. He knew how the boy had bled out from the gaping hole poked in his throat, and how afterwards his sternum had been cracked and his ribs pried open, and the skin over his stomach and the flesh beneath pulled aside like a curtain to leave his innards as naked to the world as any textbook anatomy lesson--which was, Spike suspected, more or less exactly what it had been.

And, knowing that, the sliver of circuitry lodged up in his gray matter just couldn't compete. There'd be no going back to the Franken-demon for the making of deals or the running of errands, no risking Spike or his passenger or both attracting any more of that clinical curiosity. Heat and flutter and chip were all staying right where they were for the nonce.

Right, then.

Here he was, standing at the Watcher's door, _again_\--this was getting to be regular habit, he ought to just start having his mail delivered here instead of to Willy's overpriced postbox service. There were Scoobies inside, of course. That was the point of this pep talk, wasn't it? Charge in, tell them how to rescue the boy with the species confusion problem, pull the promise out of the Slayer that he needed.

He took a last unnecessary breath and shoved the door open. There they were, all arranged--Watcher and Slayer and hangers-on and hangers-hangers-on. No Dawn, he noted reflexively.

"So we grab a guy, make him take us." That was Xander.

"Or you could just use the back way," Spike said. "Hell of a lot less bother."

Suddenly he was up against a wall and there was Slayer in his face. "_What were you doing with my sister?_"

"Wasn't doing anything _with_ her. She was along for the ride, is all." He looked into unrelenting Slayer eyes. "You going to stake me now?" He'd have to tell her, if she was. He thought the old trick of pleading one's belly might fly with the Slayer's white-hatted righteousness.

She huffed a sigh. "She made me promise not to." Her expression brightened. "But I can still knock your head against things."

"Buffy, can you maybe beat him up another time?" There was a tremor at the back of Willow's voice. "Like, after Oz is okay?"

Buffy gave Spike a last glare and pushed away from the wall.

Right. "I know a back way into the hole, I can get you all in, no alarms, no cameras--no waiting."

"Out of cash again, Spike?" Giles said.

"Well, yeah." And blood. Which he wasn't thinking about. "S'not what I want, though. Want a favor."

Giles crossed his arms. "And just what sort of favor did you have in mind?"

"Not your concern," Spike said. "Just between me and the Slayer." Because Giles knew, Giles _knew_, and if his unlife wasn't at stake--heh--then Spike wasn't up to explaining himself, not yet, not if he could help it. "Not to worry, Watcher. Probably won't disturb your oh-so-fragile scruples. No slaughter of infants, or what-all." And what had possessed his mouth to conjure that image?

"Fine," Buffy interrupted. "We owe Spike a favor, I get Slayer veto, are we happy? Because we have no idea what they're doing to Oz, and I'd like to give them as short an opportunity as possible to do it."

Willow whimpered.

"Secret entrance," Spike said. "Couple of weapons, try to look intimidating. Should have no trouble."

"Wait a minute," Buffy said. "How do you know about this secret entrance? We bribed you with blood for weeks and the best you could do was pull grass out of the quad lawn, looking for the exit."

He opened his mouth, but no explanation came to mind. Except the real one.

"Never mind," Buffy told the room. "Spike was just kidding about being useful."

"Aha. A little Benedict Arnold action, huh?"

Spike rolled his eyes at Xander. "For that to make any sense at all, I'd have to be on your side first. Which I'm not." To Buffy he said, "Look, trust me or not, but I can get you in. Unless you like the frontal attack, guns a-blazin' approach--great fun to my way of thinking, but then I'm not afraid of bullets."

Except he was now, he realized. A stray shot to the stomach wasn't a wound he could afford anymore. The sudden engulfing fear staggered him.

"Okay."

He tried to remember what Buffy was agreeing to.

She huffed. "_Okay_, we'll do it your way. But you're coming with us. At least then I know you won't be playing arsonist while we're inside."

"I'm not going." Of that, at least, he was quite certain.

"Oh yes you are. I need a little assurance that you're only as untrustworthy as usual, and that means you, with a gun, looking menacing." She frowned. "Which I'd have thought you'd enjoy."

He leaned in, dropping his voice for her alone. "I'm not going in that place again. Not giving them a chance to get hold of me again."

"I--"

"Think about it, how much fun they'd have with a Slayer if you weren't already on the stars-and-stripes-and-apple-pie list. Cut you, to see how fast you heal. Run you like a gerbil in a wheel to test your endurance. Dose you to sap your strength." Her eyes widened and he knew he'd scored a point, although he wasn't sure why. "Put a chip in your head so you can't kill vamps, and then leave you spreadeagled in a cage with a pack of 'em and see what you can do." Now he'd got her blood pressure up; he could hear it. "I'm not going in there again," he repeated.

"What, is Spike _scared_?" she asked, but the jibe was only half-hearted.

Not for him, he wasn't.

He backed up a step and crossed his arms. "Call it what you like. But you don't need me, and I'm not going."

"Then maybe you need to tell me where you got this information." She had her bulldog look on now.

No sodding way around it. "Fine. I got it from that brute you all have been chasing around."

"Adam? You know where Adam is?"

It occurred to him that it might have made more sense to mention this tidbit first, except that it was going to lead to questions he didn't want to face. "Yeah. In some caves, out at the edge of town."

"Are you working with him?"

He realized he had the entire room's attention again. "No."

"Gonna have to do better than that." Her mouth was set.

"No, I'm not working with him."

"So he just gave you some information we needed because, oh, he's sadistic and arbitrary and thought it'd be fun?"

"_No_, he gave me the information because he _thought_ I was working with him."

From Xander: "See! He _is_ Benedict Arnold. Just, you know, the other way around."

They both ignored him. "And why would he think that?" Buffy said, all menace.

Spike eyed the stake that she'd reached for, probably unconsciously. " 'Cause he said he'd get this chip out of my head if I got you lot marching into battle come D-Day."

"So why aren't you out dancing on the blood-covered roses right now?"

"I... just don't trust him, is all. Don't want him getting near me."

She frowned at him thoughtfully. "Aren't you Mr. No Touchy these days." She swung at him. He startled back to avoid the punch, stumbled over the coffee table, and went down, arms pinwheeling. She leaned over to look him in the face, still thoughtful, and nodded. "Pack up, guys," she said. "Spike's gonna show us the way in."

"And what about my favor?" he said from the floor.

She raised her eyebrows. "Well?"

"Outside."

She rolled her eyes, heaved a Slayer-sized sigh, and marched out into the courtyard where she stood, waiting.

He closed the door behind him. "I need information."

"Funny. I thought that was what _you_ were supposed to give _us_."

"Slayer, the wankers in that place did something to me."

"Yeah, we know."

"Something _else_." He had her attention now. "I need to know what, exactly." And for how long, and what he was supposed to do after that. Also a name. Ancestry. An explanation for how something so small had brassed someone off so badly that they'd put it inside _him_. "They're the bloody government, they're bound to have files on every demony thing in the place--including me."

"I'll have to tell Willow--she's computer girl."

"Fine. Just get it for me."

"As long as you show us the backdoor."

~*~*~

He left them at the entrance. Buffy came to the crypt later that night, uninjured but worn, and told him: someone got the jump on Xander, shots were fired, they all got out by the film on their blunt white teeth (including the dogboy and the shiny new defector), and Willow was limping now but healing. And no files.

He groused.

"If we'd had another set of eyes, Willow wouldn't have gotten hurt _and_ you'd have your stupid files. So next time, if you want them, you come with us."

He let that go unremarked. After she left, he reconsidered going to Adam and cutting a deal, something that'd leave Spike with his files _and_ the stowaway in his belly. Then he thought again about the demon-thing's cold interest in that stowaway, and he gave it up. He'd throw himself on the Slayer's mercy first, if it came to that.

~*~*~

Three days later she sent Xander. Amidst the jibes and insults he told Spike that they had information--probably fed to them by Adam--and a plan for sneaking into the Initiative yet another time and slipping beneath government radar and avoiding the probable government/demon brawl and defeating Adam with 'some _serious_ mojo.' However, it seemed the Slayer thought a little extra muscle was in order. "Also, she said if you don't help out the chances are slim to none of you getting what you want--and please tell me that's not as dirty as it sounds."

"Don't you wish," Spike said absently.

If it had been Buffy standing in front of him, he might have broken down and explained, begged off in hopes that she'd see her way to getting him his files without risk to an innocent. But it wasn't, and he couldn't fathom explaining to Xander, much less pleading with him, in the unlikely event that Xander even believed him. Besides, there was Adam's lovely carnage to consider, and it was just possible the nasty bugger'd get the upper hand if the Scoobies didn't get their required extra muscle.

And the sprog was tough, right? It'd already survived five and a half months of demon-fighting and commando-evading and even trashing Giles' tin can of a car--the memory of which brought a shiver of retroactive panic.

Anyway, he _needed to know_.

"Right. You give me a decent weapon, I watch your backs. That's it. No hand-to-hand unless I have to--I'm not looking for a brawl. And tell Red to leave me the bleeding hell out of the mojo!"

Xander made a move towards the crypt door and lifted his eyebrows when Spike didn't follow. "And?"

"It's the middle of the day, you moron. I have to take the sewers. I'll meet you there."

"Oh. Right."

"And don't forget my weapon." A distance weapon, Spike fervently hoped, though he slipped a knife into his belt anyway.

He took the sewer line up the streets and across to Lowell House--haunted no more, presumably, or at least not during the day. Tarp flapping, he made a mad smoking dash to the entrance and hunkered in a shadow, waiting for the rest of his sudden new comrades. Not that this hadn't been coming on for a while, he reflected bitterly. He'd nearly gone charging in with Xander--_Xander_, of all people--to save the day, not even two weeks ago.

Came the team trooping up, Xander half-supporting Willow and her gimpy leg. Spike argued for the space age turbo-blaster, and lost it to Giles, making him wish he had an Angel-style weapons cabinet for situations like this.

Inside the frat house the Slayer shattered a mirror with one sharp kick, revealing the elevator shaft beyond. Rappelling harnesses were put on and wired in while Spike watched the front door. When the other four were down, something was shout-whispered about Spike pulling one of the harnesses up for himself, at which he rolled his eyes to the empty room, leapt out to the elevator cable and got his legs wrapped around it before he'd fallen ten feet, and slid the rest of the way down.

"Showoff," Xander said.

Spike ignored him and grabbed the second prybar, and together they shifted open the door.

Safeties clicked on the half-dozen guns pointed in their faces, whereupon Spike concluded that this was not going to go as smoothly as he'd like. Then again, considering his luck with plans in this town, it was even odds that he'd jinxed this one just by coming along.

The boys in olive green marched them down one white corridor after another, none familiar to Spike other than all looking pretty much just like the one he'd used to escape. He kept expecting someone to yell "Hostile Seventeen" and poke him in the kidney with one of those rifles, but no one did. He was only a demon, after all; maybe the presence of human trespassers made a lowly demon irrelevent. He wondered if Adam was watching.

Onward and single-file into a small room warm and humming with computer circuitry. _There_ were his files, safely stored on one of those whirring hard drives.

Spike huddled up behind Willow while the Slayer gave her speech. Since they were allies in this fight, at least temporarily, he allowed himself a moment of appreciation as Buffy faced down the sorry underinformed military wankers. She's telling the truth, he wanted to say. Not wise to go up against this one; the lady knows whereof she speaks.

Suddenly the lights dimmed.

"Sir, the power grid's down," said the boy at the keyboard. "Backup's not responding. We're locked in." Then, "Colonel. Containment Area's been breached. Hostiles are loose."

"How many?" said the gray-headed Head Wanker.

"All of them."

"It's Adam," Buffy said. "I'm the only one who can stop him now. Just let me handle this. Get your people out of here."

He barely even gave her a glance. "You men follow me. We gotta take the armory _now_."

"Colonel--"

He glanced to a couple of the boys and pointed at Buffy. "These people are under arrest. Do you understand?" At their nod, he waved over his shoulder and the whole troop of them scurried out save two, who met Buffy's fists with their faces in satisfyingly short order.

"Willow, find Adam."

Willow scooted into a chair at the nearest terminal.

"Hey, what about my files?" Spike said.

"Little busy now," said Willow, gaze glued to the screen. "Buffy? The drive, remember?"

"Middle of a crisis, Spike!"

"_Slayer_," he hissed. "We had a deal. Always follow through on my deals, don't I? And I don't know how to get through these high-security systems myself."

For a moment she just looked at him, mouth gapped open. Then, "Willow, tell me again about the doohickey that's supposed to get Spike his stuff."

"In the bag," Willow said, fingers dancing. "Plug the cable into the USB; the drive should extract files with the right keyword descriptors: vampire, hostile seventeen, HST seventeen..."

"Right." Buffy rummaged in Giles' leather bag and came out with a flat black box. "USB..."

Spike took it out of her hands. "I do know what a USB is." He found the right port, plugged the cable in, and watched the progress box pop up on the monitor. This was it, what this whole enterprise was for, at least as far as he was concerned.

"The bodies of the files are probably encrypted," Willow said, still looking at her screen. "Ours were--I think it's standard."

"Well, so what am I supposed to bloody do with them?"

"I had an algorithm I was working on, before ours decrypted themselves. I can fix it."

"Lovely." Spike slumped into the chair at his terminal and watched the progress bar. Too slow. Too _slow_.

Chattering from the girls, hovering from Xander and Giles. Consensus: they'd found the demon-thing and a place for the witch's spell, both.

"Spike, pull it," Willow said. "You'll have to take whatever you've got."

"Bloody hell." But he wasn't about to get left behind--it wasn't as though he could save _himself_ from the soldier boys. He waited one second more, for one second's more tell-all ones and zeroes, and then he pulled the cable loose and stuffed the whole thing in his duster pocket.

They fought a path through flailing demons and flaming chaos and red-slick walls. At one point the Xander-Willow hop stumbled, and Spike caught her and hoisted her into his arms, and they kept running. Finally Giles pushed open the door to a small lab, white-tiled and cluttered with gurneys, monitoring systems, an IV stand, and the more exotic paraphrenalia necessary, Spike assumed, for the torture and life derailment of helpless demons. For the first time it hit him just where he was, and what had happened to him here.

Soon Buffy was through the secret back door of the lab, and gone. Giles and Xander barricaded the main door with one of the gurneys. "The ritual mustn't be disturbed," Giles told Spike. "Stay by the door and kill anything that tries to enter."

"And if it's human?"

Giles shrugged wearily. "Then don't."

The three of them arranged themselves cross-legged on the floor, candles lit, magic gourd in the center. Willow began chanting the spell. At first Spike didn't listen, but then the words started sounding inside his head instead of out and the ever-present warmth in his belly began to burn, and his last thought as he hit the floor was, _If the witch hurts it I'll kill her, chip or no chip_.


	6. Chapter 6

The dreamless dark receded. He inhaled, and coughed on the acrid magic-laced candle smoke.

The little one.

After one deep gasping breath he forced himself still, feeling for that persistent flutter. For a moment it wasn't there and he went rigid in panic/rage/grief. Then he found it, so regular and so gentle he'd mistaken it for--what? A pulse? Well, yeah. Just not his.

Stirring sounds. A muttered exclamation. Beyond, demonic battle roars and the rattling of gunfire. Spike opened his eyes and shoved himself upright.

"Oh, great," Xander said, bleary-eyed and listing. "We bring you along for guard duty and you take a nap?"

Before Spike could answer, the door wrenched open, shoving the metal gurney aside as a blue hairy horned thing barreled through. Willow screamed. Spike surged up at the thing, but it shoved him off and he barely missed slamming into the wall. With a snarl he tackled it, arms in a grapple hold around its neck as he buried his knife in the throat, twisting it until the demon fell.

Spike picked himself up, slammed the door shut, and turned on Willow. "I _told_ you, leave me _out_ of the magic, you bloody buggering stupid bint!"

She scrambled backwards, coming up hard against the wall. "I'm, I'm sorry! I don't know what happened, the spell shouldn't have even touched you!"

"You sodding idiot. It's no wonder they don't let you have a broomstick and a little black cat, you'd probably impale the one on the other!"

Eyebrows drawn tight, "Hey! That was a perfectly straightforward spell--"

"Oh, right, pouring essences and calling on primal strength, that's a walk in the bloody sunshine!"

"--and m-maybe I might have spread the radius of circumventional energy a little too wide--"

"Maybe!"

"--but it shouldn't have mattered! It couldn't have any effect at all on someone who's dead!"

"Which Spike most certainly is." Giles said. "Theoretically, if he were alive..." He trailed off, looking sharply at Spike's arm, curled protectively over his stomach. Spike hadn't even noticed he'd put it there. " You didn't terminate it."

For a moment Spike was stone under that basilisk gaze, and then he pulled himself straight. "Not going to."

"Do you mean you intend to carry it to term?"

"Wait, carry what to term?" Willow, abruptly forgotten.

"If that's how it has to work."

"_Why?_"

"Why what?" Xander now, weaving to his feet and glancing back and forth between the faces.

"Not your business."

Light glared from behind them as Buffy pushed through the back door, Riley lurching beside her and dripping like a vamp hors d'oeuvre. "What's not our business?" she said.

Giles turned to Riley, pursing his lips thoughtfully. "Were you aware that your scientists were implanting human fetuses in demons? Vampires, specifically."

He didn't look particularly aware of anything just then, but the Teutonic brow creased anyway. "No."

"_Spike_, specifically."

All eyes suddenly on him. He crossed his arms and glared back: at Xander's head-cocked I-know-I-heard-that-wrong expression and Willow's silent round-eyed 'Oh' and Buffy's generalissima impatience.

"Guys," she said. "Wounded in here, battle out there through which we have to go. Deal with this later." She nodded towards Xander and Willow. "You guys get to the exits, get 'em open somehow. Riley, try and organize the soldiers, pull 'em back. I'll take point." She swept by them to the door, giving Spike a single unreadable glance as she passed.

~*~*~

Spike sprawled across the Summers' couch, taking account of himself. Three broken ribs. Sprained wrist. Scraped knuckles, already healing. As Armageddons went, he'd gotten off pretty lightly.

Most important: One heartbeat, still fluttering. He'd ended up hauling Willow again on the way out and she'd spent the entire trip whimpering apologies in his ear, but if there'd been any damage done he couldn't tell.

Buffy walked in and offered him a mug. "Have some smelly goop."

It was pigs' blood, fetched from the butcher's by the Slayer herself after she'd insisted on walking him to her house, via sewer. Spike took the mug, sniffed, and then drained it in one long breathless gulp. Between the healing and the always-hungry factor, he'd started feeling shaky. He wondered if that was going to start being a frequent thing.

"More?" Buffy said.

"Um, yeah," he said. He handed her the mug, and she strode off again.

The front door sprang open and Dawn followed, backpack swung over a shoulder. "Spike!" She took two quick steps toward him and paused, glancing questioningly down him.

"Not getting rid of it," he said.

She squealed, dropped the backpack, and rushed forward to wrap her arms around him. He hissed as something internal scraped. "Careful with the ribs."

"Sorry, sorry." She sat back, grinning. "You're keeping it? Really?"

"Um, not killing it. S'all I've got figured so far."

She didn't seem bothered by this huge gaping unknown in his planning. A hand snaked out and landed on his stomach. "Is it moving today?"

"S'been an hour or so."

"Dawn," Buffy said sharply. Mug in one hand, she looked poised and ready to launch into another get-away-from-him, don't-touch-my-sister speech.

"Buffy!" Dawn spun towards her sister. "Spike's having a baby!"

"Yeah, we heard." The sternness faded to bemusement. "And you have homework to do. Now."

"Bu-feee," Dawn protested.

"Mom said, as soon as you got back from Janice's."

Dawn turned those gleaming blue eyes on him, entreating. When he just looked at her, eyebrows high, she glowered, gave his stomach a last pat, and stumped out of the room, snagging her backpack as she went.

"You are so lucky not to be dust right now," Buffy said. "If those vamps had really hurt her--"

"Wouldn't let 'em." He didn't know when or whence that certainty had come, but it was there now, sure and solid as granite.

She considered this for a moment, and then she handed him the refill and, to his surprise, pulled a chair across from him and sat down. She waited while he downed the second mug, and then she said, "Why didn't you tell us?"

"Tell you what, Slayer?" He wiped at the inside of the mug with one finger and then licked it clean.

She huffed a sigh. "Why didn't you tell us about..." She gestured towards his middle.

"That I'm up the duff? Maybe because it was private and not your concern. Besides," he said, trying not to see her looking at him, "it's not like I haven't been showing for a good month now."

"Yeah, and if any of us happened to notice you getting a little pudgy, the first thing we'd think of was, 'Look, Spike Jr.'!"

Enough. He rattled the mug onto the table and shifted to stand.

"Wait." She stood and began to pace the length of the couch. Abruptly she turned. "You should have told us. If something had happened..."

"Slayer. If something had happened, _I_ would have been upset and you all would have figured it was just as well. Since when do you care about a vamp's personal health crisis?"

"Since it's human," she said, then grimaced.

"Figures."

"No! That's not it. Not all of it. I mean, yeah, human, therefore in that six billion-plus column of 'people Buffy's supposed to care about.'" Her hands were flailing now. "But you were right. It could have been me. It _was_ Oz--and let's just not go into what they did to Riley."

"Slayer, we are _enemies_. We hate each other, remember? I keep having to remind you: when I get the chance, I'm going to kill you all, and it's going to be fun. For me, anyway."

She started to grin. "If that threat were actually effective, we'd already have dusted you." He growled, and she lifted a hand. "You said Adam offered to take the chip out if you'd deal with him."

Spike shrunk down on the couch. "Yeah. Just as well I didn't--chances are you lot would have busted in when he was halfway through."

"And you didn't because you were worried about, um--" she gestured again, and he raised an eyebrow.

"The sprog. What is it that none of you can talk about my delicate condition with actual words?"

"I'm pretty sure 'sprog' is not an actual word. Wait, _delicate condition_?"

"Sprog is so a word, if you live in a proper country."

"Fine, your sprog. Your baby." Even now, she was making faces. "You were worried about your baby, and that's why you turned him down. Isn't it."

He squirmed. "Well. Yeah. But that's not the point! I want you all dead, don't you get it?"

"Except for Dawn?"

"That's different." He glowered at her, and she smiled smugly back. Finally he sighed. "What do you want from me, Slayer? I'm knocked up, I'm not actively trying to kill you--for the moment--and can we just leave it at that?"

Her hazel eyes turned serious. "But what are you going to _do_ with a baby?"

"It's not like I'm going to eat it, or did you forget?" He pointed to his head.

"If I had then you _would_ be dust," she said, arms twining in her all-business pose. "That wasn't what I asked."

He floundered for a reply. "You know, blood of the innocent doesn't come cheap. Could keep myself in smokes and decent liquor for six months, off what a little one'd bring on the black market."

She almost believed him; he could see it in the steel hardening in her eyes. Then, "You're telling me you gave up the chance to get the chip out, for _money_?"

"Well..." There was no relenting in that skeptical gaze, and finally he said, "I don't know, okay? Haven't got it all sorted yet. Figure there's gotta be someone out there wanting a little one, some bird who can't have one of her own. Someone who won't care if it got started in a Petri dish by a bunch of overeducated lab monkeys." He stood. "Now, if the interrogation's complete, the suspect would like to take his leave now."

"You going to your crypt?"

"Yeah." He regarded her suspiciously.

"I can walk you back." At his look, "The gang's meeting up for movies later, but it'll take Xander a while yet to choose from the 'smorgasbord of video options.'"

"_Slayer_," he said, "I'm--" oh how he _hated_ that word "--pregnant. Sort of. That doesn't make me good; that doesn't make us pals. Doesn't even make me helpless, despite what you seem to think. I don't need a mass Scooby effort on my behalf."

"Other than the part where I'm buying you blood and Willow's cracking encryptions for you."

"You _owe_ me those files." He glanced down at the mug. "I dunno what the blood's for."

"Call it an advance."

"On?" he said, suspicious.

She shrugged. "There's bound to be something we'll want you to do. We give you blood, you be on hand when we need you."

It sounded like charity. Taking what he wanted was one thing and he'd had a century's practice, and when taking failed him he wasn't above demanding, but it was something else to have it offered to him out of sympathy or pity or--was that guilt shading the Slayer's expression? Well, guilt was all right, he supposed.


	7. Chapter 7

He knew this was a dream, because in dreams he might as well have been human: the colors were washed out, the sounds tinny and muffled. He could never smell anything at all.

Then again, he might have been clued in watching the Watcher swatting vamp-faced Harm away with a program. Or by the Slayer, wearing an atrocious wig and a tasseled sack that probably passed for a flapper dress among those who hadn't lived the era.

Spike circled the back of the auditorium, eyeing the plump and sweating and hairy necks, selecting a victim. It was never really satisfying--he couldn't taste anything, either--but there was some small measure of triumph in draining someone, even in dreamland. There, in the back row. A big lug, athletic, features tending toward the apish, an inclination of his head that Spike took for a nancy trait. Spike sidled up the row to sit, smirking, in the neighboring empty seat. "Enjoying the show, mate?" He turned the smirk into the coy grin he'd used before for luring nancies--and got no response. Straight, then, was he? It made no difference to Spike. He clapped a hand over the bloke's mouth and leaned in for the bite.

And leaned back, mystified, with a mouth full of nothing. The guy's neck could have been made of rubber; Spike's fangs had made no mark that he could see. He twisted to the woman on his other side, swept her dark hair from a face pretty, almost elfin, and tried again for a bite. Again, nothing. Neither of them ever even noticed him.

So it was going to be one of those dreams, was it? Spike slumped in his seat with a sigh.

"But we haven't even rehearsed!" Willow's voice rang sharp and clear over the cotton-mouthed hubbub of the crowd. Craning his neck, Spike caught sight of her, making tight, tense motions to Buffy as she talked. He slipped over the back of the seat and walked down the aisle. No one commented when he hopped onto the stage. As he neared he caught her scent, that blend of apples and incense and her own particular odor that she'd doubtless deny. "Look here, Red, how come--?" But she'd turned away, into the curtains, and when he made to follow he smelled something else, musky, unwashed, primal... He was backing up before he even noticed, and when he finally felt sufficiently far away he realized he'd vamped out.

He'd leave the nightmare to Willow, he decided.

He wandered up the aisle, and out, and found it night. He followed a stream of merrymakers toward a carnival's garish lights. Suddenly another whiff came to him: the Watcher, smelling of cologne and, oh so faintly, a hint of very good scotch. There he was, with that woman who'd come visiting him once, and--the Slayer? In kiddie clothes now, pulling at Giles and running ahead and squealing even younger than the she looked. She didn't have a scent.

"Come on," yelled a very familiar voice. "You'll miss it!"

Oh, it was one of _those_ dreams.

There he was, the image of Spike himself, calling to Giles like they were mates. Spike slid in behind them, past Giles' woman--crying now--to see himself... posing? "I've hired myself out as an attraction!" the other Spike declared. Cameras flashed. He struck poses he must have borrowed from Dracula, the diva. He looked like a sodding idiot.

Spike spun and strode for the door, glancing at Giles' woman as he passed--and paused. She was crying, which didn't concern him particularly, but now that his eyes had caught on her belly he couldn't pull them away. So Giles was having a nipper too, was he?

There was room next to her on the sarcophagus, and after a moment's hesitation he pulled himself up on it. Now he wished she'd stop the crying so he could talk to her, bumfuzzled though he was as to what he could possibly say.

Finally, when it didn't look like she meant to dry up anytime soon, he said, "So, uh, how far along are you?"

She didn't answer, didn't even glance his way, just kept on with that same toneless weeping. Bugger. She probably couldn't see him either. He slid into his fangs and snarled at her, and he might as well not have been there at all.

But he didn't get up. He looked down at his hands and slipped her quick sideways glances. Finally, "Does it hurt, getting all big like you are?" No response, of course. "Seems like it'd have to, your skin stretching and all that. And then there's the birth part, and I _know_ that hurts--comes up all the time on the telly. It's always sending bints off into comas, or giving 'em amnesia--although that was just the one show," he amended. "S'a wonder there's still a human race at all, seeing the trouble you lot go through to add a person to the world."

Another breath, another glance to that downcast, glistening face. "So, you and old Rupes? 'Course, you're probably keeping yours. Funny, I'd never have figured him for Father Knows Best. Bet you he's never held a sprog in his life. Suppose that's all right, though, you birds having that natural mothering instinct and all. Convenient."

It took a few moments' inspection of his knuckles to find his next words. Finally he leaned over until he could look up into her eyes. "What's it feel like?," he asked. "Is it the same for you? Heartbeat, and the little one moving around, doing the backstroke, so's you feel almost alive?" A long moment with no sound but the weeping and those last words echoing in his head.

Suddenly he shoved to his feet. "What'm I saying, you _are_ alive. Or not dead, anyway. Or--" Disgusted, he turned to leave, and paused at the doorway to consider the daylight now streaming in. Cautiously he stuck a finger into the light, and when it didn't sizzle, he stepped out.

Before him spanned a desert, empty and harshly bright.

Slayer-scent.

He turned to see behind him not the cave he'd come from, but one of the Initiative's huge, white-painted hallways. The Slayer walked down it, pace measured, gaze fixed past him.

"How come I can smell you?" Spike said.

She shifted her gaze to him, head cocked curiously. "Why are you here?"

"It's a sodding dream, why do you think I'm here?"

"You don't belong here. You're not even one of us." Then she crouched, expression puzzled, and she pressed her hand to his stomach. "But _you_ are." Then she rose and walked on.

Another girl came out to meet her, a curvy ash-blond Scheherazade, wide-eyed and breathing vague mystical wisdom.

He picked up that other scent again, wild, feral. _Slayer_, he realized. It was the essence Buffy exuded every time she fought, it was what he'd tasted in his first Slayer and gone nearly out of his mind on, but this was that essence compounded, concentrated, and ancient--much, much older than anything he knew.

Spike found himself backed against a boulder.

There she was, as feral as her scent, circling Buffy with a stride low and furtive.

The other blond was mouthing gibberish to Buffy, but Spike didn't pay much attention. She didn't matter. The Slayers, bright and dark, were winding up to a battle, and it was going to be bloody gorgeous.

There--Wild Child launched herself at Buffy, straddling her and slamming her head against the sand. Then Buffy twisted, shoved her away, swiped the side of that dreadlocked head with her heel. A feint, a leap, a kick into the sand. Then they were standing, feet braced and fists pulled in tight. Buffy straightened, saying something Spike couldn't quite catch, and for an instant the entire world was still. The other Slayer leapt again and then hands to hair, knees to guts they went tumbling down that long, long hill.

"Spike."

The other blond was at his side. She had no scent, but she could see him; could he bite her, he wondered? But she was regarding him openly, seriously, and he decided he could put off trying.

"What's all this, then?" he said.

"You think you know what's to come. What you are." She lifted a hand to his chest. As she laid it over his dead silent heart, heat radiated from her touch, spreading, warming him all the way to toes and fingertips and earlobes. She pressed, and something gripped him beneath his ribcage and squeezed. He gasped at the shock, and then it was gone and his heart was beating--not like hers, steady, regal, but quick and fluttering. "You haven't even begun."


	8. Chapter 8

It was supposed to be easy. Buffy'd promised that Spike would behave and said something about an advance, and then she'd sent him and Xander an hour out of town, where Spike would sniff out the abandoned vamp-nest with his supernatural nose (and how wrong was that?) and they'd find the magical doohickey Giles wanted. Except of course the nest wasn't really abandoned, and what were the chances that Spike, even pregnant Spike (and Xander wasn't even _thinking_ about how wrong that was) would pass up a fight? Although, granted, the vamps pretty much had them surrounded before they realized what was happening.

Xander had managed to stake two--count 'em, _two_\--vampires all by himself, no Slayer in sight, and turned just in time to see the last vamp standing take a leaping kick towards Spike, feet aimed at his chest. Under that full-body attack, all Spike could do was fall.

His scream was pain and rage and vicious fear, and there was none of his usual grace in his return attack; no efficiency, just extravagant all-encompassing bloodlust. Xander couldn't see if he had a stake and then it was moot because Spike had straddled the vamp and twisted its head off in one sharp motion. And then he was kneeling there in the weeds, curled around his stomach and pulling in breaths so sharp and quick a human would have passed out.

"Spike." Vampire, Xander. _Fangy vampire_. "Spike!" Xander shook off the hesitation, crouched at the vampire's side and grabbed his shoulder. "Are you--? Is it--?" He remembered something Dawn had chattered in passing. "Spike, you're hyperventilating, _stop breathing_. You can't feel it if you're breathing."

Spike gasped once and then stilled, his muscles cord-tight under Xander's hand. One second. Two seconds. All at once he collapsed into the weeds and started drawing breaths again, slower this time.

"Spike?"

"Heart's still beating," he rasped, closing his eyes. "Bloody bug-fucking _bastard_." He was trembling like a DT case.

After a moment, Xander said, "Look, I'm going to go see if I can find the mystical whozit." Eyes still closed, Spike waved him away. Xander edged into the cave, nerves afire for sign of any more vamps, but it seemed they'd all come out to the party. Eventually he found the shiny amulet thing that matched Giles description, and took no time scooting back out of there.

He found Spike still lying on the matted tangle of vetch and California poppies. They had to get to the car and get home in the last hour and a half before sunrise, but Xander didn't say anything, just settled onto the dew-wet ground to wait. He'd forgotten, a little, how terrifying it was to face down a vampire in a rage, but he remembered now. And never, _ever_ did he want William the Bloody that mad at him, chipped or not.

After which thought Xander promptly found himself saying, "You really panicked for a minute there." And then held his breath.

But Spike's ridges had melted away, and all he did was open one eye far enough to glare. "Big Bad does not panic."

"No?" A little heartened, Xander kept going. "You were hyperventilating, and you don't even have to _breathe_. You were seriously worried about your... kid."

Spike sighed, a much steadier sigh than Xander would have expected two minutes ago. "What's your point?"

"I don't get it."

"Don't bother." Opening the other eye now, Spike gingerly pushed himself upright, and then started angling onto his feet. Xander stood and offered him a hand, and Spike barely hesitated before he took it--and then nearly tumbled onto the grass again before Xander got a firmer hold.

"M'not injured, let me _go_."

"Well, _I_ am, so give me something to lean on, will you?" Not that the gash in his arm was bleeding that badly and it wasn't like he had to walk on it, but Spike quit trying to shake him off, which was mostly the point anyway. Together they stumbled the hundred feet to the car.

Once Spike downed a bag of blood to steady himself--good thing he'd insisted on bringing a snack, Xander doubted they'd find a butcher open this late even in vampire country--Xander gave the map a glance and turned the car back the way they'd come. After a few moments of silence, he said, "Seriously, I don't get it."

"Don't expect you to, Harris." Now Spike just sounded tired. "Let it go."

"No, I want to know." A tired vampire was much, much less threatening than a semi-panicked vampire. "You eat kids, right?"

Spike glanced over at him. "Have done, yeah."

"And you don't regret it."

"Do you regret eating that mass of overprocessed animal fat you called a hamburger? Was a cow once."

"I dunno, Spike. I think that might have been genuine beefy-flavored soy enriched with vegetable oil."

It was enough to get a snort and a smirk, and then Spike fell quiet again.

"Okay, fine," Xander said. "It was a cow. But there's kind of some fundamental differences between cows and humans."

"One's tastier than the other."

Xander gave his head a sharp shake. "And I so don't want to know which you think is which."

An unapologetic snort. "Vampire."

"So you don't regret eating kids, I don't regret eating cows. Fine." Not fine, Xander, what are you doing even having this conversation? "_You_ are, are _incubating_ a kid for nine months, and there is absolutely no way in a month of Hellmouthy Halloweens you'd see me that worried about a cow." Another shake of the head. "And now my mind is going scary places."

"Yeah, spare us the images, would you?" Spike shifted, sprawling his legs out. "I told you, I don't expect you to get it."

"Try me."

A pause. Finally, "It's not like it's a person. Not yet. Even if it were, it'd make no difference to me whether or not there was one more human toddling around the planet."

"Even though it's yours?"

"Mine."

"Yeah, you know, Son of Spike? Another twig on the family maple?"

Spike was giving him that you-moron look. "It's not _mine_. Vampire here--my stuff doesn't do quite everything yours does. Make new humans, for instance."

"Oh. Okay. Um." And somehow that was even weirder, which meant there was something that Spike pregnant with his own kid would have been less weird than. Sunnydale strikes again. "So..."

"S'just, this one's got no one looking out for it, 'cept me, and isn't that a sodding sorry state of affairs?"

"Not that I'm disagreeing, but I thought predators _liked_ going after the weak ones. Easier prey."

"Get that off the Discovery Channel, did you?"

No way was Xander apologizing for having a connoisseur's appreciation of cable TV. "Yeah, and...?"

A huffed sigh. "Well, it's not like it's worth eating now, is it, even if I could?"

"Um." There was no non-evil answer to that question.

"What I'm saying is, what's the bloody point of killing something isn't even properly alive yet? Nothing to fight, no fun in the kill. Why bother?"

"Um." There was that word again, the sign of patented Xander Harris articulation. "Spike, there's still a difference between 'not worth killing' and 'if you hurt it I'll rip your head off'--in a completely literal sense, by the way."

"Well, yeah," he said, but his eyes had shifted away to what Xander knew to be a particularly boring patch of ceiling. "Not like I'm going to let anyone else have at it. I've got dibs."

"So you're saying once it's born, and grown, _then_ you'd want to eat it. Him. Her." Xander couldn't believe how calmly he was positing these possibilities, like it was all just abstract, no lives in the balance, no blood soaked evidence to weigh. The fact that he could even raise these questions told him enough, didn't it?

He glanced over to see Spike's head leaned back against the headrest, eyes closed. "Spike?" Figures he'd fall asleep right at the critical question. Or pretend to fall asleep--

"No."

"What?"

"I said no, Harris. Wouldn't eat this sprog if it was all the difference between me and dust."

He couldn't help asking the next question. "But if it was somebody else's kid--"

Spike shifted abruptly towards the window, face in his arm. Muffled, he said, "Wake me when we get there."

Huh. Was that the answer you wanted, Xander? Or the answer you didn't want?

~*~*~

After Willow told him for the third time how much faster she coded decryption algorithms without him looking over her shoulder, Spike flung himself onto the couch with one of the Giles' less stultifying old volumes. He was chortling over an account of the mysterious locked-room exsanguinations of certain 'particularly distinguished' (read: pompous and useless) London notables--stunts for which Drac the welsher still owed him eleven pounds, with interest--when the door squeaked open. It wasn't a scent--rich, hinting of incense and the tang of magic--or a footstep he knew.

"Hey, sweetie."

Spike slammed the book on the coffee table and hauled himself up to look over the back of the couch. There was she was, ash-blond and possessed of full, kissable lips. "I know you."

The girl's glance flitted to him, questioningly to Willow, and back. "Y-you do? I d-d-don't think--"

He thrust himself to his feet. "I dreamed you."

"Oh, that's original. 'I had a dream about you.'" Willow slid between them, grasped the girl's hand, and lifted her chin. "Tara's with me."

"That's lovely. I hope you'll be very miserable together." He leaned over to peer up under the girl's hair, fallen across her face. "You were in my dream. I've never even seen you, and you showed up in my sodding dream. You _talked_ to me."

"Willow, I d-don't think he's h-hitting on me." She pulled the hair back to look him in the eye. "W-what did I say?"

"You said--" He glanced at Willow. "Some privacy?"

Willow made an abortive gesture towards the door--from which daylight was still streaming in--and said, "Fine. I need a break anyway. Tara, if he starts being annoyo-vamp, just yell." She went out and shut the door behind her.

"Y-you're a vampire?" Curiosity was chasing the fear around her face.

"You mean Red's never even mentioned me? Spike, slayer of Slayers, occasional bane of the Scooby existence?"

"Oh!" Her face lit. "You're the one that's p-p--"

"Yeah, that's right," Spike muttered. "Glad that tidbit's made the rounds already."

The hair slid down again. "I'm s-sorry, it's not any of my business."

He slumped onto the back of the couch. "Not like it won't be bloody obvious before long, anyway."

"S-so tell me about this dream."

He described the end, the stark desert sand and the Slayer battle and her, primped up like a harem girl. "You were impartin' gibberish to the Slayer--Buffy, I mean--and then they went rolling down and you turned to me and..."

As his pause drew out, she said, "It's okay, you don't have to tell me."

"No. Want you to explain it to me." He repeated what that other, more ethereal Tara had said. "S'gibberish, too, really. And you put your hand on me and I was warm again, like bein' alive, and then you started my heart beating, only it didn't beat like mine." Another pause while she looked at him carefully, earnestly. "It was the little one's heartbeat. Quick, light."

"The... Oh."

"So, what? The sprog's life, yeah? Makes me live again. Makes me... not a vamp?" Not evil? Not Spike? Each alternative shifted the sands farther beneath his feet.

"D-dream interpretation isn't s-something I'm very good at it. It's a gift, you know? Not one of mine. B-but this doesn't sound like a seer's dream--I mean, I don't think you should take it literally."

"So the sprog's turnin' my whole existence upside down _metaphorically_."

"I think the baby's going to be a catalyst for you."

"My bloody redemption, is that it?" Somehow, he had nothing but impatience for this notion that ought to have filled him with rage or self-righteous terror, or both.

"_No_." He looked up, startled at her vehemence. "D-don't you _dare_ put that burden on a person. You can change _for_ someone, sometimes, but if you expect them t-to fix you--or if you think you're going to fix them--you'll both end up broken."

He blinked. "Right. Duly noted."

She blushed and ducked her head. "S-sorry. Family thing. My mom had this, um, h-health problem, and she married my dad because he said he could h-heal her."

"And he couldn't, so he resented her for it and made her believe she'd tricked him into it. Or else him sayin' it was a bunch of rot, and he got a woman he could cow into anything."

"N-not quite like that."

And he got a daughter he could cow thrown into the bargain, Spike decided. "So that's it, then? 'A change is coming into your life'? Could have gotten that from the bloody horoscope."

"S-sorry. Maybe it'll make more sense later?"

"Yeah." So much for getting his fortune told.

"Um," Tara said, and stopped.

He lifted an eyebrow.

"I, um, apprenticed with a midwife when I was younger. For a little bit. D-do you mind?" She motioned towards his stomach.

He regarded this soft-voiced girl hiding behind her curtain of hair, and decided her touch would gentle. He shrugged. "If you like."

She knelt and, before he could protest, she'd unbuckled his belt and slipped the top buttons of this latest pair of jeans -- already too snug, he'd have to give up on denim altogether and find something with more give. Then she slid her hands beneath his t-shirt and flattened them against his softening, rounding belly. She didn't even seem to notice what her position would look like to anyone who walked in. That was professionalism, he supposed.

"How far along...?"

It didn't take any calculation; the number was always at the back of his mind now. "Five months and three weeks."

"You're carrying sm-mall. And low."

"Is that bad?" He tried to ask the question coolly, and suspected he'd failed.

She shrugged. "It doesn't really m-mean anything. Everyone's different. It d-depends on how the baby's turned, the shape of your hips, whether this is your first. Women usually show m-more in their second pregnancy." Like a blind woman reading Braille, her fingertips traced the curve of his belly by some arcane logic of midwifery or witchery or both.

"Anything else you can tell?" he asked.

"Well, there are lots of tricks for figuring out if it's a boy or a girl by how you carry."

He wondered if she'd ever noticed how little she stuttered when she wasn't paying attention. Probably not. "Any of them work?"

"Magic, if you're attuned. Not so much with the 'carry low, it's a boy' theory. But w-whichever you guess, you've got a fifty percent chance." Her lips quirked in a smile. "Besides, it's p-probably different with you, anyway."

He shifted away from her and started tucking his shirt back in. "Yeah, probably your first male patient, aren't I?" Much more of that and he'd be her first to get a hard on during an examination.

"Yeah." She rose and sat next to him on the back of the couch.

He rebuttoned his fly. "Any--" He flicked a glance to her face. "Any wisdom for the expectant vampire?"

"Don't panic?"

"Wish that didn't sound so much like a question."

She set her chin and looked at him, mock-stern. "Don't panic."

"Right." He eyed a speck of dust on Giles' floor. If it were that simple...

He felt a touch, feather-light, and looked down to see her hand over his. She gave him another soft smile, mute, and he heaved a sigh. Don't panic. Okay.


	9. Chapter 9

There was nothing left to read that offered even a quiet chuckle and no one to talk to except Willow--who must be getting close, he thought, because every time she spoke it was in a bright-eyed babble of jargon that three demon languages and a half-dozen human ones hadn't prepared him for. And the Watcher's television was on the fritz.

And then, "It's a girl," she said.

So he'd lied to the boy. It _was_ a person. She was a person. A very small person, just now, a bug-eyed stick-limbed chit of a thing whose purpose in life was to steal his dinner and pooch his belly out, but still, she was a _she_.

"She have a name?"

Willow scanned, clicked, scanned again. "Looks like just a number. Serial number something something, project code something else, trial four."

"Trial four!"

The witch jumped and squeezed back in her seat, probably flashing back again to the attempted eating last year, or maybe the broken bottle incident the year before. Another day, he'd have found that residual terror comforting.

Not now. "The wankers stick her in a _vampire_, of all the sodding ridiculous places to put a little one, and they can't even be bothered to give her a name?"

"I c-could see if they list her parents. That'd tell you something, right?"

"It'd be a start."

"Okay, doing that." More clicking. "Hey, maybe it's you!"

"Maybe what's me?"

"Maybe you're the dad. You know, the real dad. Genetically."

At first he thought she was kidding, that she'd taken this one time when something actually mattered to him and decided to stomp on it. But she'd had chances before and hadn't taken them. "Bit dead here. Vampires can't reproduce."

"No?" She was grinning now. "Granted, _we_ don't know how to take, like, dodo DNA and make new dodos. Not yet. But these are secret government scientists; they can probably do all _sorts_ of things we don't know about. Like impregnate male vampires."

He wanted to retort something, wanted to crush the hope unfurling in him before it had a chance to bloom. Too late. "You're saying she could be mine."

"Yeah," she said, in a tone of I-just-said-that, tempered with uncertainty as she really looked at him and saw all the Williamish awe that he knew lay open on his face. She ducked her head and kept her eyes on the screen as she continued looking. Finally, "Ooh, found 'em! Mother name blah blah, deceased, father--oh. Also deceased." She looked up at him apologetically.

"Pet, I _am_ deceased."

"Oh!" Another look. "Um, Pvt. George Flannigan?"

He laid his head back against the armrest. _I'm **not** disappointed, you hear me? Doesn't make any difference._ It _didn't_ make a difference; it wasn't like he'd had any latent hope before.

He wished Willow had never brought it up.

"I'm sorry, Spike."

He recalled her trying to comfort him during other bitter disappointments and felt an unaccountable wish to reassure her. "Never thought she could be mine. Still not killing her."

_Her._

He closed his eyes and splayed his fingers wide across his stomach, not so much to feel her, because he could do that well enough just by holding still, but to affirm to the world that she was there. She _was_ his, wasn't she, in every way that mattered? For a while, anyway. And then--

'And then' was blank and featureless, and he shied away from it.

The door squeaked, and multitudes of shoes clumped in: Slayer and Watcher; Droopy Boy and Demon Girl, both freshly exercised, judging from the scent. Soap couldn't wash away everything. Only Tara and Dawn were lacking, one taking a final and the other off doing whatever it was just-barely-teenagers did on a May afternoon in California.

"Do you know how many levels of wrong that is?"

Spike opened his eyes to see Xander's gaze fixed on Spike's hand, still lying on his stomach. He snatched it away and glared. "Did some calculating, yeah."

Xander nodded, looking faintly lost, as though his habitual hostility had gone missing and he wasn't sure what to do without it. Maybe that moment-of-weakness confession in the car the other night hadn't been entirely a mistake--provided cessation of hostilities was a desirable result. Spike was reluctantly concluding that it was.

Finally, Xander said, "So, is evil dead planning to share the couch with the rest of us?"

"M'in the family way," grumbled Spike. "Should be some allowances made." Nonetheless, he shifted his feet to the floor to give Xander room.

"Spike's going to have a girl!" Willow blurted.

"Um, congratulations," said Buffy, looking nonplussed and a bit amused--apparently her perpetual state of mind with respect to him nowadays. "What else do we know?"

Willow knew quite a bit, it seemed, apparently learned while he'd been busy wanking to himself. He'd just as well not have shared all the details with the Scoobies at large, but she didn't ask, and at least it saved him ever having to explain any of it himself.

Duration of trial: Nine months--no less a shock just because he'd been expecting it. He tried to imagine himself with nine months of sprog in him, and couldn't. He decided the reality would present itself for his inspection soon enough.

Diet: Nothing but blood. He'd figured that out, too, the what if not the why, which had something to do with the artificial womb 'circumventing normal metabolic processes.' That accounted for the 'hangovers,' and also the similar trauma associated with Weetabix and buffalo wings. He'd never admitted even to himself why he'd stopped eating those. On the plus side, it seemed to mean that those long pissed stretches early on hadn't done the chit any harm; the same filtering process that turned pigs' blood into sprog's blood also kept out all the other nastiness he usually had running through his system.

"So, does Spike get morning sickness?" Xander said. "And weird cravings?"

"It's not like that," Willow said, frowning a play-nice frown at him. "He's not--" she glanced to Spike for he couldn't guess what, reassurance maybe. "He's not really pregnant, like we think of it. His body and the baby's body aren't really interacting--the, um, artificial womb is doing most of the work. It's more like incubation, I guess?"

Spike smirked as Xander paled over his choice of words from the other night.

"So he won't have the mood swings and the clumsiness and the drooling--"

"Ew," from Buffy and "Bloody hell!" from Spike and "Willow!" from Xander.

"I did research!" she said defensively. When they'd subsided, she said, "He'll just get all the structural changes."

"The whuh?" said Xander.

"She means I'm going to pork up like a bloody Christmas suckling."

"And again I say--"

"He's going to get really fat, Xander," said Anya, shooting Spike such a brilliant smile for being able to translate that he could only muster a little fury at her choice of words.

"Plus probably the soreness and stuff," Willow added.

"Brilliant."

Side effects: The heat--necessary for human growth, of course, courtesy of the might-as-well-be-magic womb. Also the breathing, triggered by the chip and also necessary--just because the little one had his dinner swimming through her veins, more or less, didn't mean it didn't need to be oxygenated.

Number and result of other trials: Insufficient information. "There are seven others listed--"

"Hence the 'trial four.'"

"Right. Hey, that's weird--it looks like they were all girls. The embryos, I mean. There's some Y-chromosome discrimination going on there, huh? But it looks like all the rest of them were terminated --"

"The chits?" Something in him was prepared to be angry about this.

"No, the whole trials. Like, dusty vampires."

Instead he felt relief. If he hadn't escaped when he did... "Nothing left?"

"It doesn't look like it. It's weird--there's no reasoning here, no results, hardly any records. It's like they just went poof." Off his look, "Which I guess they did."

So he was the only one. He wasn't sure whether or not that mattered to him, and concluded that if he couldn't tell, then it probably didn't.

Objective: Testing of artificial wombs in surrogates of various species and genders.

"So you're saying the bit of tech that's keeping me warm is the _whole bloody point?"_

"I-I guess so? I don't really understand why--if you want to test medical technology for humans you test it on rats or chimpanzees or something, not vampires."

He'd asked if the Initiative was a cosmetics company, but this was worse, this was the bloody colonist regime experimenting on its own species for nothing but a little lucre--not that he objected to lucre generally, nor to the exploitation of humankind for the gain thereof, but this hadn't a thing to do with humankind. This had to do with _her_. "So what the bloody hell did they mean to do with the byproducts of these trials?"

It took Willow a few moments to find it, and in the meantime he snapped his lighter open and closed, open and closed until Giles told him to please toss the bloody thing out the window. Spike responded by jamming it shut one last time and then glaring, practicing on each face in turn. He'd like to have gone and mauled something except he couldn't risk doing battle with anything nasty enough to be worth killing.

"Ooh, here it is," said Willow. "It looks like they were going to put the babies in some kind of program for orphans of servicemen--'cause her parents are both dead, and they were both in the army. Maybe you could still do that, once she's born? If you wanted to."

"Yeah," said Xander, "because Spike the single mother--can we say worst case scenario?"

Spike stared at the idiot boy. "You want to turn her over to the same wankers who did this to her in the first place? Are you bloody daft?"

"He doesn't have to do that, Xander," said Willow, as though she hadn't just suggested it. "But there are places to take babies. There's adoption--"

He surprised himself, and her, too, by snarling at this suggestion.

"Or, or there are those places where you can drop off a newborn if you can't take care of her, no papers, no questions--which would be a good thing, right? They probably wouldn't believe you if you told them, they'd laugh and ask how you got her out--"

Something snapped. "And how _am_ I meant to get her out?" His tone was what he might once have termed 'low and deadly,' and even now, without the deadly, Willow was shooting him nervous glances.

"It says, um, surgical extraction--oh, like a C-section. Which makes sense because, you know, you don't have--um, never mind." Her cheeks were flaming.

"I don't have a cunt, is what you mean." He shoved himself to his feet. With his miniscule shred of calm he noticed that the Slayer had, too, ready to pounce. "Well, shouldn't I be just bloody grateful the government didn't see fit to give me one of those, too. Chop my balls off while they're at it--might as well neuter me properly, if they're gonna do it at all. I know you lot think it's fine and wonderful they ripped my fangs out, made me all safe for society. Doesn't matter, I'll _adjust_." Willow winced. "I'm only dead, after all. Don't have rights. Doesn't matter what you do to me, I'm just an empty soulless vessel. Perfect place for a baby, if you've got a spare and don't know where to keep her."

He stopped because he could feel the pure liquid rage leaking from the corners of his eyes and he would not, he _would not_ cry in front of these miserable humans sitting there pitying him and _looking_ at him and he was so bloody tired of being looked at, like -- yeah, like an attraction in the bloody congress of freaks.

He grabbed at his duster and stalked for the door. Behind him Willow yelped, "Spike! Daytime!" and if she hadn't he wasn't entirely sure he wouldn't have just walked right out into it. Instead he snagged the tarp he'd come in with, marched under it to the manhole at the corner of the block, and dropped in, fists clenching with bloodlust he didn't dare indulge. He sloshed down the line to a place comfortably dark and almost dry, the sewer reek rising all around him, and then he slid against the wall until he was sitting there in the muck and he let the harsh angry tears roll loose.

Eventually, wrung dry, he leaned back and paused his ragged breath. There it was, the flutter, steady as always.

"That wasn't about you, love, you understand? S'what the military blokes did to you and me both. S'not your fault. Still want you."

He glanced up the tunnel and down, but it didn't really matter who saw him now, did it? He was in this for the duration. Cautiously, he laid his hand over the flutter, warming his palm on the heat.

_Still want you_. He hadn't even noticed when he'd started.


	10. Chapter 10

His crypt wasn't the same anymore. Oh, it was still his crypt, a bit more broken of late than when he'd moved in although a broom had tidied the worst of it. But now he stood looking at the cobwebs, and he wondered if the spiders were poisonous. He looked at the rust-flaked tangles of wrought iron -- were they supposed to be gates? -- and he thought about tetanus.

He couldn't imagine bringing a baby here. Granted, his imagination with respect to babies had previously been restricted to interesting ways to drain them, memories that made him queasy now because he didn't know what _she_ would look like and so every baby he remembered ever eating looked like her.

Yet even when he could picture himself holding her, a soft faceless bundle, he couldn't picture them here, amidst so much rough unheated stone. He couldn't even keep her warm; he'd be no more than insulation to her. And though a part of him was certain he'd never let her out of his arms once she was in them, another part knew that sometime he'd have to go out for blood or enough dosh to get it, and what would he do with her then? Who'd he hand her off to when, sooner or later, a demony type wanted a fight and he had to give it to them? He'd _want_ to give it to them; he doubted having her to take care of would be enough to calm the occasional battle urge.

To say, yeah, he was going to give the human sprog a chance at life, like he'd had once -- that, he could do. He was still a bit spooked by the _being pregnant_ part of it, but he'd seen a lot of funny things in a hundred twenty years in the demon underground, and anyway it was only temporary.

But keeping her, _raising_ her -- he hadn't a buggering clue how to do that.

He couldn't give her up. He'd deluded himself to ever think he might. But he knew bugger-all about what he was going to do with her instead.

He pushed himself up onto the sarcophagus and rubbed his belly gently, and she rewarded him with a soft kick. She'd been moving about more these last few days, and he wished he knew what that meant, if anything.

But that, at least, was a question he knew how to find the answer to.

He slid to his feet and had just pulled his duster on when the door squeaked open. He spun, his fangs an instant from dropping by the time he'd processed who it was.

He straightened. "Niblet."

"Hi, Spike," Dawn said, peering into the gloom beyond him. He wondered if she was looking at the cobwebs, too. Then he noticed a very familiar sort of white paper bag in her hand.

"You bring something?"

"Oh, yeah." She held the bag out away from her like a French maid confronted with a stray ear.

He took it, confirmed that it did indeed contain one plastic canister of pigs' blood. He shot her a skeptical eyebrow. "Wasting away, am I?"

She giggled. "Not so much." She closed in and patted at his stomach -- to see that it was still there, presumably. "I just thought, in case you were getting low -- I didn't want her to get hungry. Or, you know, you either." She glanced up at him, her face watchful and ready to shut if he gave the slightest hint that she'd done the wrong thing.

Like he'd complain about free blood, even if his poker winnings -- or cheatings, rather -- two nights prior had been unusually profitable. "Thanks, pet."

Instantly, the watchfulness was gone and she was grinning. Then she stepped back and finally looked him up and down. He braced for a comment on his scrounged sweatpants, about which the only good things that could be said were that they stretched and they were black. "Are-are you going somewhere?" she said instead, eyeing his duster.

"Got a demon I need to ask a question of," he said, turning to put the blood beside the other canisters in his brand-new, only-mostly-used refrigerator.

"Can I come?"

He turned. "Demon, pet. Big evil monster thing?"

"Your doctor wasn't an evil monster thing -- was he?"

"Well--" Now was not, he decided, the time to explain what Kurellis liked to soak their tentacles in. "You've seen one demon, you've seen 'em all."

"But I haven't seen -- well, just him. Buffy won't even let me look at pictures. And besides, I can't go home yet because Mom will want to know why I left Janice's so soon, and if I go to Janice's she'll want, you know, details."

"Details."

Flushed, she was peering intently at some of his very plentiful dust. "About me and my way older guy."

"Your--" He stared. It must have been a matter of too much brooding, because he couldn't help it -- he leaned back against the sarcophagus and laughed until his eyes watered. Finally, he managed, "Got a hot and heavy night planned, do we?"

Still red, she squinted at him, as though trying to decide whether or not she'd been insulted.

"Never mind, pet." He went to the door and swung it open. "Coming?"

Once they were out on the street, Dawn said, "Buffy said you kind of had a wiggins a couple days ago."

"She did, did she?" Stupid bint, couldn't keep her mouth shut. "And that's what I owe the pleasure to, isn't it -- you checking up on me to see I'm all fine and proper."

"I guess so."

He wavered between two responses, settled on, "Vampire, love. Been managing a lot of years now."

"But you weren't chipped before. And you didn't have a baby."

"Yeah, well." Then they were at Willy's front door and he didn't have to think about how to answer that. "Now you stick close to me and keep your mouth shut, got it? Don't need the Slayer getting wind of you being here."

"Got it," she said, all seriousness.

"Right." He pushed through the bead curtain and scanned the place for vengeful relations of any of his recent demon kills. There were none that he could tell. He nodded to Willy. "Letitia holding court tonight?"

"In the back." Willy thumbed the direction. "Hey, you're buying, right? Can't have people wandering through without buying something."

Spike dismissed this with a gesture. He was halfway across the room when he realized Dawn wasn't with him. He glanced back to see her standing in the middle of the floor, staring at the pea-green vinyl booths and the ketchup walls and the sparkly garlands hung over the door and around the ceiling -- were those from last Yuletide, or the one before? -- and sneaking nervous sideways glances towards the bulbous-headed Granich demon at the bar.

"Niblet," he said, and she startled and scurried over to him.

"Sorry."

"Is a bit of a shock, first time, innit?" he said. "Man has a truly evil taste in obsolete kitsch. Quite admirable."

She flashed him a bit of a grin at this, and with that vote of confidence he pushed open the second curtain of beads.

"Spike," said Letitia, settling her plenteous length against the wall and regarding him with that particular warm expression that made a man feel both utterly desirable and an unexpected but potentially interesting species of tsetse fly. Two head-tassels turned in his direction. "What can I do for you?"

"That list you gave me before? Another something like that."

"Oh," she pouted, "You ask _boring_ questions. Ask me something tasty."

He snorted. "And what'd that cost me?"

"Oh, I don't know, let me see -- your dearest poem, maybe?"

"Dearest poem?" Dawn whispered.

He ignored them both, searching the ceiling for just the phrasing he needed. "I need the name of a specialist in parasitic and symbiotic health."

"And what have you got? Public gossip or private?"

"Public," he said, marshalling his eyewitness, on-the-scene account of the Slayer's final soldier-smashing exploits.

"I think I'd rather know what you need the information _for_. Or is she your symbiote?" She nodded to Dawn.

"Say again?"

She gave him a split-faced, froggish grin. "Your consort, of course. She's a bit young, isn't she? But I suppose you'll break her into it."

"Bloody hell!"

"But the correct term is 'companion' nowadays, isn't it?"

"She's not my bloody consort or symbiote or whatever else have you! She's--" Blank, he glanced at Dawn.

"I'm a friend," she said.

He searched her face, but he couldn't find any flippancy there, nor sarcasm. She caught his stare. "What?"

He turned back to Letitia. "Right. Friend. And that's _private_ gossip."

"Caught me," she said, grinning unapologetically. "Just for that -- imagine _Spike_ with a _friend_\--" He rolled his eyes. "For that I'll give you a name and referral to my own local P&amp;S doctor -- _if_ you'll tell me what you need it for. With details."

It wasn't a bad deal, all things considered. Letitia's word was the best there was, and he wouldn't mind not having to leave town. Still. "It's private."

"Of course."

"_Private_."

She rolled her eyes, an expression that he was positive wasn't native to Rodex demons. "You know I'm safe."

"Right." He shoved his hands in his duster pockets. Was this ever going to get any easier? "Niblet, you tell her."

Eyes wide, "Tell her what?"

He huffed a sigh. "You know."

"Oh!" She turned to Letitia. "Spike's going to have a baby."

A moment's pause, and then, in that rich rolling voice that Spike fervently wished belonged to someone, well, at least bipedal, she said, "Re-eally."

"Yeah, it's gonna be a girl."

"A girl what? Vampire?" Letitia shot him a puzzled glance.

"No, you know, a girl person. Human, I mean."

"Well, then," Letitia said, practically cooing. "Why don't you tell me all about it."

And Dawn did, including details Spike couldn't imagine Buffy sharing with her. He had the impression she'd been itching for a willing audience -- and Letitia was definitely willing. Every so often the demon would roll a glance towards his middle.

Finally he said, "That's enough, Niblet. That's got to be more than payment for one medical referral."

"Absolutely," Letitia said. She reached for her ever-present notepad, penned a number, and handed the paper to him. "I'll tell them you'll be calling. A pleasure doing business."

"Yeah, I'll bet," he said, tucking the paper in his pocket. He turned to go.

"Wait." When he'd turned back, she said, "You know I don't take sides in petty demon squabbles."

"Um, yeah." He wasn't sure where she was going with this.

"But Dr. Mo'ullrnrl was a friend of mine."

"Was...oh."

"So I'm giving you this one for free. I assume it was you the vampires were after when they murdered him?"

"Had a run-in with some oddballs, yeah."

"Are you familiar with them?"

He shrugged. "Cult, miracles, prophecies, the usual show?"

She gave a dismissive wave of her tassels. "They're looking for a child born to two vampires."

"Are they now?" He snorted. "Been looking a while, have they?"

"Yes, and in the meantime they infiltrate medical offices and records departments, looking for signs. I gather they found out about a vampire who was expecting and decided he was an offense to the cause."

"Me."

"Looks like."

"Figures. Thanks for the head's up." He sighed. "Come on, Niblet. Time to see you home."

Letitia called after him, "You just keep that little Spikette safe, you hear? Does she have a name yet?"

He threw a grin over his shoulder. "You'll find it out next time you know something I need."

"Spoilsport."

He managed to usher Dawn to the door without incident, unless he counted the detour to the bar for a bottle of some kind of fizzy strawberry thing that he informed her smelled worse than a good half of the demon brews on tap. And then they were outside strolling through the warm May night with a chorus of crickets for a serenade.

After a few sips of her strawberry poison, Dawn said, "She looked kind of like Jabba the Hutt."

"Yeah, but don't ever, _ever_ tell her that."

"With a feather headdress. If he dumped grape Kool-aid all over himself."

He snorted a laugh.

"So, what _are_ you going to name her?"

"Hadn't given it much thought yet. Just figured out a couple of days ago I was keeping her."

She rolled her eyes moon-high. "Of course you're keeping her."

"Oh, you were already aware of this? Thanks for the mention."

She gave him another of those looks that he figured must have been patented by a teenager somewhere back in the mists of time. Then, softly, "How many of those demons wanted to eat me?"

"What, at Willy's?"

She nodded.

"They'd leave you alone, mostly, at least in public. Humans there too, you noticed."

Another sip. "Yeah."

"I mean, the Granich demons have a bit of a thing for eyeballs -- like the fluid inside, can't really feature that one -- but that's only during rutting season. And the Denabians -- they're the frilly ones -- they're mostly vegetarians now, religious thing, but one falls off the wagon now and again." He gave her a hard look. "Not helping, am I?"

"There were vampires, too," she said, barely audible.

"That there were," he said.

She studied the rim of her bottle and said, "I want you to teach me how to fight."

He stopped, gaped at her. "You. Want me to teach you. How to fight."

"I know I'm little, but I'm growing! I've grown a half-inch since March."

"Is that right."

"Besides, Buffy's not very big either."

"_Buffy_ is the _Slayer_."

"But Sunnydale's full of demons and it's not like she can protect me _all_ the time. What if those vampires who tried to kill you came here? I should be able to defend myself."

"Yeah, and the one who should be teaching you this is the _Slayer_, who not only will not then stake me through the heart for engaging her sister in violent behavior, but has the added bonus of not getting a migraine every time you forget to block a punch."

"Every time I... Oh."

"Yeah, 'oh.'"

"But Buffy won't show me anything! And Mom just pats my shoulder and says," -- Dawn lifted her eyebrows patronizingly--"'Honey, Buffy knows more about demons than we do, and we should trust her judgment.'" She looked up to Spike as though this were the irrefutable final evidence in an unanswerable argument. When he just looked back at her, she huffed. "And anyway, Willow was almost my age when she started helping Buffy, and she wasn't even a witch then."

"Pretty sure she still had a couple of years on you."

"_Spi-i-ike_," she said, pulling at least a half dozen more syllables out of his name than he remembered putting in. "Please?"

Swimming in that wide-eyed blue pool of pleading, he had an idea. "You'd have to come to the crypt," he said.

"Okay," she said instantly.

"Figuring out how to get there's up to you, you understand?"

"Okay," she said again.

"And what to tell your mum if you come home all bloody." Not that he expected her to, but she needed to know what she was getting into.

She shrugged, eyes bright and unconcerned. "I'll think of something."

"And you're coming with me to see the sodding parasitic health doctor, right?" he said, almost before he'd thought of saying it and bare seconds before he regretted it. What'd he said before? He was a grown vamp?

She only shrugged again. "Yeah, okay. Hey, maybe you'll get to see her! You know, with that machine thing."

"Maybe," he said, suddenly distracted by the idea. How much different would she look, now that he knew she belonged to him? Or possibly vice versa.


	11. Chapter 11

Dawn stood at the crypt's outer door, feeling cold and sort of trembly because today Spike was going to teach her how to kill things.

At first she'd thought the cold and trembly was because of Spike. She didn't have a crush on him anymore, because it was hard to be friends with someone and have a crush on them at the same time, but with the leather and the blue eyes and all he was still pretty hot -- 'sex on a stick,' Janice would say on a particularly daring day. Although maybe she wouldn't say it now that he was starting to get sort of pregnant-shaped, which made Dawn just a little irritated with hypothetical Janice.

But anyway, she didn't think that was it, because she hadn't felt trembly last week when she'd visited, or like she couldn't breathe all the way in. So it must be the killing things part. But it was okay, they were _demons_, they needed to be killed -- some of them, anyway. Like those vampires...

The door opened in front of her with a shuddering groan, and she stumbled a step backward.

"You comin' in?" said Spike's disembodied voice. "Or you standing guard out there, making sure that bloody Durok demon doesn't try selling me thermal underwear again?"

She slipped inside, pausing in the double entry while her eyes adjusted.

Spike swung the inner door open. "So, ready to do some violence?"

"Um--" She stepped down into the crypt and wriggled out of her backpack. "Wait, first I brought you stuff."

"Yeah? Edible stuff?"

"No..." Crap. He sounded so hopeful. "I didn't get my allowance yet this week."

"Your -- you went and got me blood out of your allowance?" He looked carefully at her, head cocked.

"Did you think I stole it or something?" It occurred to her he might have been impressed by that. Too late now.

"Wouldn't try it, if I were you. That butcher on Second Street, he's a bit free with a stake."

"Oh. Okay." He _had_ looked pretty scary. Speaking of which, Spike was giving her that anytime-now eyebrow. "Look," she said, digging into the backpack, "I brought you books!"

"Oh? I look bored? Need some light reading?"

"They're baby books. From the library." She pulled them out one by one and then handed him the pile.

"_The Mother's Guide to Prenatal Development_?" He eyed her skeptically.

"The baby parts are all the same." She took it from him and hopped up on the sarcophagus. "She's, like, six months old, right?"

He slid onto the lid next to her. "Something like that." He still didn't sound entirely convinced.

"So it shows how big she is now." She flipped to the page she'd sticky tabbed and pointed to the black-and-white baby curled up like a bean, one hand stretched out in front of it so you could see all five fingers. Underneath was the note, '26 Weeks - Actual Size.' "See?"

"Huh," he said.

"And then there's this list of all the stuff she can do--" She tried to turn to the next tab, but he'd clamped his thumb down on the page. "Spike?" His gaze was fixed on the image -- which wasn't all that great, really; it was kind of grainy -- like he thought he'd find Elvis in it if he looked long enough. He didn't move, didn't even breathe, and she'd gotten sort of used to him breathing even though it wasn't usual for vampires. His other hand was pressed flat against his stomach. "Spike?"

"Huh," he said again, and lifted his thumb.

She turned to the page with the list, which he dutifully read, and then he listened while she told him about each of the other books with their boring-but-necessary titles like _Nutrition for Infants_ and _Babyproofing the Home_. She hadn't thought much about the last one when she picked it up, but now it occurred to her that there might be a reason she'd never heard of kids being raised in crypts, even in Sunnydale. By the way Spike's expression blanked when he saw the title, she thought it might have occurred to him, too.

"I can help if you want," she said. "I think Mom still has some of my old baby stuff in the basement, and we can clean out these spider webs, and--"

"Thought you were here for something else? Keeping yourself not killed?" He dropped the book he was holding onto the sarcophagus and hopped down.

"Oh. Yeah." She bit her lip and tucked her hair behind her ear. Didn't look him in the eye, because now she was feeling chilled again.

"Was the whole idea, right? Let's get on with it." He strode over to a hole in the floor that she didn't remember and glanced back, waiting.

"Okay." And now her stupid voice was wavering, which was, yeah, _stupid_. This was her idea. She followed him over, and then down a rickety ladder into a big soupy dark nothing.

"Welcome to my parlor," said Spike from somewhere off to her right, and then came click and a spark from his lighter, and she could see: rough stone walls, more-or-less flat stone floor, dust, _more_ spider webs, a couple of lamps now aglow. And, against one wall, a wooden board with a person's silhouette traced on it.

Spike spun on his heel to face her. "Here's the problem. You're not much more than morsel-sized, you're not a vamp or a Slayer or anything else with special strength, and you haven't got any skills at all. Yet." He paused. "You do know those tricks, right, about going for the balls and stomping on the other guy's toes and not getting yourself cornered?"

She shrugged. "Self-defense stuff. Sure. We did a little bit in PE."

"Yeah, well, good to know against humans, but it's gonna do you sod-all against most demons. But it's not like learning how to punch is going to get you much farther, you haven't got the muscles for it. Not to mention teaching you's liable to give me a headache."

She crossed her arms and felt her eyes prickle. "So if something wants to eat me, I should just go jump in some ketchup?"

"Nope." He reached behind a rock and brought out something that glinted. He was grinning, and she couldn't think when he'd looked so psyched about something.

"What is it?" she asked.

Suddenly he twisted, made some complicated motion with his elbow, and then there was a barely-audible _snick_ and something was poking from the wooden board, right in the neck of Mr. Police Outline.

"So, what is it?" she said again, wrapping her arms around herself to hold her shudders in as she tried not to think about the blood trickling from the wound -- it'd probably be in black permanent marker, just like the rest of the person.

Spike held out another of the glinty things, and she edged forward to see a sort of knife, short, with the two edges of the blade curving to a point. "It's special for throwing," Spike said. "Get the nasty before it's anywhere near you, once you get the hang of it."

Like Buffy. She was going to have a weapon, just like Buffy with her axe and crossbow and sword and bagful of stakes and -- okay, so not _just_ like Buffy. Still. "Show me."

He did, first demonstrating a few more times, but in slow motion. Then he stood behind her and positioned her arm. Step back, elbow up, back, down and back again as her hand and the pencil in it flicked forward. "Like you're cracking a whip."

"Indiana Jones. Right." She went through the motions again, and again, feeling her whole shoulder stretch out as she tried to pull her arm back as far as it'd go. "So let me try with a knife."

"Right." He slipped one into her hand. It was cool to the touch, a comforting sort of compact heft in her fingers. "Only the point's really sharp -- you're not using these for slashing. Whole point is to bury the point in what you're throwing it at, right? And, hint: you only aim it at what you want to hit."

"Okay."

"So step back like I showed you, yeah, shoulder back--"

The knife's handle banged against the board.

"All right, you're releasing too late. When it's--"

"Right next to my ear, I know," she said, picking up the knife again. "And sticking straight up." She rehearsed all the motions again in her head, like Mrs. Lang said to do for volleyball, and then she pulled back, flicked, let go, and watched the knife knick point-first at the man's ear and fall with a clatter.

"Better."

"Is this really going to help?" she said as retrieved the knife. "I mean, if a big seven-foot demon gets hungry, what's he going to care if I poke him in the arm?"

"A big seven-foot demon comes at you, you run fast as those scrawny legs can carry you," Spike said.

"So..." She eyed the target again.

"All that stuff I said's still true. Xander's twice as big as you, and you know how often he ends up slumped in a corner versus how often he actually manages to put a dent in something?"

So what was the point? She'd been right the first time: dump on the ketchup. "Yeah?" She tried to shrug, but her shoulders were too tight.

"That goes double for you. Running, screaming, hiding's still your best bet most times. And this helps, a little. If all the bloke wants is an easy meal and you make things difficult, he's apt to go find easier pickings. And supposing you can't, this way you have a chance at delivering some damage without getting trounced -- if you can keep out of the thing's way while you're tossing barbs at it."

"So maybe I can distract some icky green scaly thing a minute before it chomps on me," she said, all choky because of how tight her throat was. "Because I'm edible, right? I'm just a morsel. I bet I taste great, don't I?" Because he'd know, he'd _know_ how she tasted, more or less, and she'd always known he did but she'd never cared before.

He was peering at her, expression puzzled, which was fair since she wasn't quite sure what she was talking about, either.

"It's just metal," she said, wagging the knife at him. Her voice was so hard it could have come from someone else. "No good with vampires, right? It'd just make 'em mad, and then they'd bite you anyway."

"Niblet?" he said softly, shuffling towards her.

"See? I'm just a nibble!" She squeezed her eyes shut against the feel of hands grabbing at her beneath flourescent lights.

"Dawn." He was practically in her ear. "S'not about killing some demon on the street, is it?" he said. "S'about those vamps that got their fangs into you."

"It is not," she said, hunching in and glaring at him, just glaring until the pressure building up behind her eyes broke free in hot, splashy tears. She dropped more than sat, butt falling hard against the floor and knees folded against her chest.

For a moment it was just her, swiping away tears with one hand, and then Spike settled cross-legged at her side. She dared a glance at him. His hand hovered just above her shoulder. Finally the hand landed; patted her once, twice; retreated. "You get nightmares?" he said.

"S-sometimes." Mostly just of antiseptic smell cut with lemon, and of things holding onto her vise-tight. And the pinching of fangs in flesh. And the tickle of blood snaking down her arm, down her neck, and every single time she worried about staining her shirt -- it was a different one in every dream, but always her favorite, and she always knew how mad her mom would be about ruining it. It didn't even make dream-Dawn feel any better knowing she'd be dead by then. "Jeez, I'm such a _baby_."

"You got bit by a vampire, and you lived to have bad dreams about it. Beats the other option."

"But Buffy's been bitten, too, and she's not scared of vampires," Dawn said sourly. And then she waited for him tell her how Buffy was the Slayer, so she didn't need to be scared.

But he didn't. He said, "You know that for a fact?"

She pulled back far enough to look at him, to see if he was joking. He _looked_ serious. "Duh. Of course she's not."

"If she acts like she isn't, it's because she can't afford to. Can't have you all doubting her. And yeah, plenty of fledglings out there that she doesn't have any business being spooked by -- clumsy, brainless, bloodhungry, like zombies with fangs. But a Slayer'd be daft not to have a healthy respect for the things she's dealing death to. Say what you like about her, your sis isn't stupid."

"You think?"

"Ask her sometime if _she_ gets bad dreams." A chuckle. "Might even have one or two about me -- ask her if she ever flashes back to that time I had her bent backwards over a crate. She had about ten bushels of frills on."

And he'd meant to kill Buffy then. He'd meant to _kill Buffy_.

The Spike picture in Dawn's head tilted, shifted, like one of those illusions where she could see the old hag or the girl, but not both. Suddenly she couldn't see the girl anymore, no matter how she squinted, just the hag. Just Spike, fierce as a Rottweiler snarling on a chain, teeth bared and gleaming.

"_You're_ a vampire, too," she said, her voice harsh and tight in her throat.

A pause. "Noticed that, did you?" he said, his expression as blank as if all the feeling had been leeched right out of it.

She twisted so she couldn't see him anymore; she couldn't stand how far away he seemed, looking at her like that. "But -- but you won't eat me, will you? Even if--" She couldn't finish; she couldn't stand it if he answered wrong -- who'd she have to cry on if _he_ bit her?

He slipped his arms away, a bit stiff, and shifted so she couldn't look away from his eyes even if she tried. Careful, clear, he said, "No."

She crossed her arms. "O-okay."

"Chip or not, hungry or not, it's irrelevant. I'm not going to eat you. Ever."

Sniffle. "Well, good."

"And I'm not going to let anyone else get you, either. That other -- that was my fault. Wasn't paying attention, didn't get to you fast enough, and then I almost let you bleed out. What a _git_." A deep breath, and he was peering into her eyes, completely earnest. "Won't happen again," he said, each word weighted.

She believed him; she kind of couldn't help it when he looked at her that way, like he actually cared whether or not she did. But it didn't fix the picture in her head. She looked at him, really _looked_ at his face, trying to take blue eyes and cheekbones and forked scar and make the Spike out of them that she'd always seen up to ten minutes ago. Spike who leaned back and sprawled like no one else she'd ever met, who listened to her like she mattered, who'd wait until the last minute to save her because it was more exciting that way.

"What about Buffy?"

"What about her?" he said.

"W-why--" Sniffle. "Why would you want to kill her, and not me?"

"Because _you_, I like," he said, and then stared at her a bit cross-eyed, like she'd made him say the words.

"Oh." She thought about that a moment. "What if you get tired of me?"

He opened his mouth, and she figured he was about to say something sharp and funny that didn't actually mean anything, but then he closed it again. Finally, "I won't." Deep sigh. "I never do."

His hand drifted up towards the arm the vampires had bitten, and she realized she was clutching at it with her other hand -- it'd been happening when she wasn't paying attention, ever since the last bandages had come off. Spike peeled her fingers from the pinky-white scar like he'd done when he'd tied it...

And the picture shifted again. Not all the way back, she still couldn't blank out the image of fangy Spike, but now she could see the other one, too. She heaved a breath that turned into another cough. It was okay. It was okay. There was the Spike she knew.

Then she needed a hug, and as Spike's arms draped cautiously around hers she realized how awkward he was at it. Figured -- hugging, not one of those famous vampire skills. Her giggle turned sniffly. "Ugh." She pulled away, rubbed at her nose, and then dropped her slimy hand back in her lap.

"Maybe call it a day?"

"Yeah," she said. "But I still want to learn stuff. Just so I'm not, like, totally useless."

"And maybe next time, we'll see if we can't teach you some basic pointers on staking." He sounded a little unsure saying this, like she was going to get all weepy again just like that. But she was tired of crying -- actually, she was just _tired_, and a little dried out.

Upstairs, as she shifted into her backpack, he said, "Don't you want the books?"

"Nah. You can keep 'em as long as you want."

"Thought you said they came from the library?"

"Well, yeah, but do you know how Mrs. Schmidt would _look_ at me if I tried to actually check out a bunch of books about having a baby? And then she'd call Mom, and--"

"Getting to be quite the delinquent," he said, but he was grinning. So she'd been right, he _was_ impressed.


	12. Chapter 12

He was cleaning out cobwebs when they came, Willow and Giles, their twin furrowed brows harbingers of something ill. He closed the door behind them and grunted in response to their mumbled hellos. Willow clutched a three-ring binder in front of her like a shield.

"It seems," Giles began, and then paused to remove his glasses. Bloody hell, he was already polishing the lenses and he hadn't even said anything yet. "It seems we've made -- that is, Willow has made -- a discovery."

She shot Giles a fidgety glance. "Yeah. Um, you know the program I wrote to search for files on the Initiative's mainframe?"

"Yeah?"

"It turned out, it worked way better than I thought it did. It picked up all these files that weren't coming out of anywhere in the main directory -- I don't think they were even accessible to anyone except the wiggiest of the bigwigs."

"And your little bits-and-bytes truffle hunter sniffed them out. Which means they have something to do with me and--" He clamped his hands onto the sarcophagus lid. "And the little one."

"Right! Because, remember how we couldn't figure out why they'd do medical testing on vampires? And you know how weird it was that all the babies were girls?"

He didn't know where she was going, but he knew he didn't like it. "Yeah..." Vampires and girls... No. _No_.

"We think they were trying to make Slayers." Her shoulders drew tight and ready to flinch as she waited for him to process that, but he'd already been halfway there.

"Those sick bastards."

There it was, the flinch, and the wide Willow-eyes. "There was a lot of stuff they didn't know, like that there's only one Slayer -- except, you know, Faith. But they had this idea that they could make them -- raise an army, I guess."

"And they expected to do this how, exactly?" There was the low and deadly again.

"Some time ago," Giles said, "several members of the Council of Watchers theorized that Slayer potential might be triggered in an ordinary girl if she were exposed to vampires at a very young age. Experimental results were disappointing, but it was argued that they were performed when the girls were too old. Willow--" He nodded to her, "-- has found correspondence from one of these renegade Watchers, apparently telling someone in the Initiative just enough to get the experiments done that he wanted."

"Hence me with a sprog," Spike said. "Doesn't get any younger than that -- or any closer, either. I take it they didn't much care about me being male?"

Willow shrugged. "It looks like by the time they'd figured out the science to deal with the 'dead' part, the 'male' part didn't really matter. A couple of the other vampires were guys, too."

Spike took a deep, steadying breath. "So, the Initiative wankers were a bunch of sodding idiots, not news, and now I'm up the duff, also not news."

"Yeah, except..." Willow trailed off.

"Except what?" He was fairly sure he didn't want to know.

"Except they might have been right," she said.

"_What._"

"Statistical studies suggest that there may be a, a sort of proximity effect," Giles said. "It may even help explain which Potential is activated -- so far as we are aware, at the time of her calling Buffy was nearer to the Hellmouth than any other Potential of eligible age. She may have been called because of the impending danger with the Master."

Spike huffed a sigh out of his crumbling disbelief. He'd known it made no sense for the labcoats to gift him with a daughter, even by accident, but he'd thought when he'd escaped with her they'd slipped whatever plan the mad scientists had calculated.

"It wouldn't be so bad if she were a Slayer, would it?" Willow, placating, always playing peacekeeper. "You wouldn't really mind if she slayed other vampires, would you? I mean, you're kind of friends with Buffy now, sort of."

"You--" He tried to piece this together in his mind, trace the logic of it, but his brain was stumbling off in so many directions at once. "You think I'm upset because she might be a white hat?"

"Um, yeah?"

"She's a baby!" he exploded. "Not a vamp duster. She's not even born yet!" And there were his hands out in plain sight, cupped around his little girl. "You want to hand her her death sentence before her life's fairly started!"

Feet shuffling now, and the eyeing thereof. "Buffy's been all right so far--"

"Are you blind? You've been playing sidekick how long now? Buffy's already died once, or so I hear. She teamed up with my own evil self for the sole purpose of offing her boyfriend. How many times has she saved the world, and what'd it cost her?" He turned to Giles. "You're a bloody Watcher, you know what slaying does to them. Refines 'em so they're bright and hard as steel, and then just keeps burning, until they're pitted and brittle and finally they shatter. You _know_."

And Giles, damn him, was looking at Spike with something like sympathy, layered over a sharper, deeper pain that Spike didn't want to contemplate. "Yes," he said softly. "I know."

Willow's voice broke the moment. "But we don't know anything for sure, right, Giles?"

He cleared his throat. "Yes, well, the statistical results were not conclusive -- certainly the correlation was nothing like a hundred percent. Even if the theory were sound -- which we don't know -- we'd no reason to think that this...practice--" His gaze flicked down Spike for an instant. "--would always yield the desired results."

"How would we know if it did?" Spike said. "Some sort of test? Some mojo?"

"There _is_ a diagnostic spell to check for Slayer potential," he said, "but it won't work until she's born, and even then, it isn't recommended to perform any magic on or near an infant for several months after birth."

"Like your 'is it a demon' spell?" Spike suggested sarcastically. "Or Red's big joining of the mystical foursome?"

Willow made a squeak that sounded like a precursor to further apologies, but Giles interrupted. "Had you informed us of your condition, the latter issue wouldn't have arisen." He looked pointedly at Spike, and then continued, "However, even if she were a Potential, the Council estimates there are several thousand worldwide at any given time. Her chances of being called would be miniscule."

"Yeah, except who knows what kind of 'proximity effect' having a vampire for a dad will have on her."

Giles eyed him sharply with renewed, not altogether neutral interest. "Surely you don't intend to keep the child," he said.

"I -- what? You're daft. What would _I_ do with a little one?" Spike asked, scrambling.

"An excellent question," Giles said softly.

Willow glanced back and forth between them, lips parted with some unvoiced thought.

"Well, what if I did want to keep her? Which I don't. Lot of mess, babies."

"What if you did?" Giles repeated, eyebrows high in disbelief. "Spike, let us for the moment pretend that you are _not_ a soulless murderer of innocents." He took off his glasses and thrust them in Spike's face. "You are still irresponsible, impulsive, self-centered, and violent. You are amused by others' pain. You do not work and have no steady income. You are unmoved by any sense of compassion or empathy. You are a thief, an extortionist, a braggart, and a drunk.

"You are, in point of fact, utterly incapable of physically, mentally, or emotionally providing for a child." He shut his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I would not leave a dog in your care, much less a future Slayer."

"But shouldn't he get to say what happens to her?" Willow asked, her eyes shining huge with...worry? "He is kind of the one who's pregnant."

Looking startled, Giles said, "You can't possibly think he could take adequate care of her, even if he wanted to."

"Well, no. I mean, maybe? I mean..." She glanced at Spike, but he was fairly sure there were no answers to her dilemma stamped on his forehead.

"It isn't as though we've no alternatives. There are protocols in place for orphaned Potentials. The Council--"

"You want to give her to those wankers? They're the ones that did this to her!"

"Not the Council proper," Giles said. "This was orchestrated by a renegade who has long since been turned out of the ranks."

"Like yourself?" Spike said.

Giles' gaze narrowed, but he only said, "Regardless of her provenance, if she were a Potential, the best possible place for her would be in the Council's care."

"And if I didn't want to give her up?" Shut up, Spike, shut _up_.

Giles' snort sounded almost amused. "How much trouble do you suppose a vampire with a severe human-violence handicap could give them?"

Spike met Giles stare for stare and waited for something between them to shatter. Finally, he shrugged with careful indifference. "I guess it's something to think about. Big decision, figuring out what to do with a baby."

"Yes," Giles said, voice deceptively soft. "How very odd that the decision should be yours."

"Funny old world, innit?" Spike said. Pinned under that gaze, he had trouble finding the breath to speak. "Anyway, nothing to be done at the moment, is there? Just wait and see if she's one of these maybe-Slayers?"

"So it would seem."

"Right, then," Spike said, willing his shoulders to relax and his hands loosen. "In the meantime, I don't suppose you'd give a hand with the cleaning." He flicked a thumb towards the back of the crypt. "Haven't gotten around to much fixing yet on the fixer-upper."

"I could maybe come by later this week," Willow said. "I bet Tara would, too -- she's been asking about you."

"Yeah?" For a bare moment he looked forward to that, a cleaning party with the witches, before he remembered that he hadn't really meant the offer. He cocked his head to a mocking angle. "What about you, Rupert?"

"Thank you, no." Giles finally returned his glasses to his nose and glanced about the gloom with distaste. "I've a few more sources to review on how Slayers are chosen."

"Right." Spike snagged his broom from the corner it'd been leaning in. "Well, then." He looked at them pointedly until they said their farewells and then he shut the door firmly behind them. He allowed himself thirty seconds slouched against the sarcophagus, eyes shut and breath shuddering, while he considered this new disaster and all the small catastrophes to come in its wake. He saw again the firm, cold purpose in Giles' eyes and heard it in his voice.

Rising, Spike stuffed what little cash he had on hand and his one remaining pouch of blood into his duster pockets and wrapped Dawn's books in the blanket he'd been sleeping under. Then he scuttled down the ladder and sacrificed a few seconds more glancing at the crib he'd salvaged a couple of nights ago, a bit battered in places but nothing some pliers and duct tape couldn't straighten out. But it wasn't worth dragging halfway across town, not when he was in a hurry. Neither was the tiny blanket, rat-nibbled, which he'd put in the crib more to keep it from looking so barren than for any other reason; nor the stuffed elephant he'd plucked from a dumpster for the same purpose.

There was, in fact, nothing he wanted to take, nothing of value at all except the knives, bought for two silky white Abyssinians the week before. He fingered them a moment. Friendship, plain and simple, wasn't generally a vampire concept; maybe if it had been, he might have found someone before this who didn't seem to notice, or at least to care, that he was a vampire. But Dawn didn't, or she hadn't until a few days ago, and that was...

Well. No use in thinking how that had been. It didn't matter now. He set the knives back down with the wistful hope that she'd find them and know he'd left them for her.

He shouldered his makeshift bookbag and angled around the corner to his personal sewer exit, and then he took off in the direction of a certain abandoned shed. It wasn't a straight shot, but the sun would be set by the time he reached the DeSoto.

Finally, he was leaving Sunnydale for the last time.


	13. Chapter 13

Spike trudged the sewer and tried to figure out where he was running to. L.A. was the obvious destination, with its top-notch demonic medical care. Of course, Angel was there, too -- was that a plus or a minus? Minus, Spike decided, considering the number of pokers Angel had been jabbed with the last time they'd met.

Maybe Mexico, or parts further south, where the weather was always comfortably warm -- and diseases plentiful and varied. Bugger.

North, then, somewhere it actually rained and he could take her out in the daytime now and then.

Or... hell, who was he fooling? He'd never been one for sitting still. It was only inertia and a sort of perverse affection that'd kept him in Sunnydale this long. It hardly mattered where he aimed for now; chances were slim he'd still be there by the time she was born.

At the usual manhole he crawled up the ladder and out, his nose so full of sewer stench that he was already aboveground before he caught Buffy's scent. There she stood, leaning against _his_ DeSoto with her arms crossed, her lips thin with what he took for impatience. He stiffened, too late: she'd already caught sight of him.

Bloody _hell_.

"Slayer," he said, stumbling a step backward, and then his wrists were shackled in hot Slayer hands.

"I need to talk to you, Spike."

"Bit busy at the moment. Mind if I catch up with you later?" Because maybe it was just regular Slayer business she was on, a demon to identify or some such, and all he needed was fifteen minutes' head start.

"Willow told me," she said.

So much for that. "She tell you I'd run?"

"She had an idea. Dawn told me where you stashed the car. Look, I _need_ to _talk_ to you. Just talk." She grimaced down at his hands. "If I let you go, do you promise not to disappear on me?"

He looked her in the eye and willed every ounce of sincerity he'd ever faked into just one word. "Yeah."

As soon as her grip loosened, he swept a foot behind her ankles and, fighting the lightning strike in his head as she fell, he dropped his blanket full of books and ran.

It took her less than three seconds to catch up to him. As she gripped his shoulder, he spun and swung one good punch at her chin. The chip blinded him as she hit the ground a second time. He scrambled backwards and nearly smacked into a brick pillar at the edge of the lot. Past it, he sprinted, still dizzy with pain and thrown off his usual stride by the shift in his center of gravity that he hadn't gotten used to yet.

If he could just get into the woods, he could lose her...

The next moment Buffy tackled him, contriving to flip him around in the process so he landed on his back, almost gently, with her straddling him but not the baby, which meant she was practically sitting on his neck. "You always follow through on your deals," she said accusingly, one hand cupping her chin.

"Wasn't a deal," he wheezed. "Was a promise, extracted under duress."

She huffed a sigh. "So, what, are we going to have this conversation like this?"

He closed his eyes. "What's it matter? Jury's decided. Verdict's already in." His brain scrambled for a plan, anything that'd get him and the little one safely away with no worse than the headache throbbing behind his eyeballs. He came up blank. Keep her talking, that was all he could do, that and hope for another opening. "Fine, go ahead. Start apologizing for stealing my little one soon as she's out."

When no answer came, he looked up at her. "That's it, isn't it? Maybe you could just about stomach letting some faceless tyke get corrupted, but a corrupted Slayer puts the whole soddin' world at risk, am I right?" He could tell by her stone gaze, her utter lack of surprise that he was. "Saw it all in the Watcher's face. You're going to turn her over to someone who'll treat her like a destiny instead of a little girl. Aren't you."

"So tell me why we shouldn't," she said evenly.

He opened his mouth to reply, but he'd hit the limit to the number of words he could force out with a Slayer on his chest, and he started choking. Buffy shifted off him and pulled him sitting upright, and then she waited while he got his breath.

Finally, he said, "Vampire here. Doesn't matter that I'm the one who's been carrying her around for months. Doesn't matter I'm the only one who cares what happens to her -- _her_, not just some abstract good that comes of rescuing her from the labcoats' clutches, or mine, for that matter. We're not people to you, neither of us, just pebbles to be sorted into the good and evil jars."

"But what would you do with a baby?" Buffy's expression was sincere puzzlement, tinged with suspicion for his presumably nefarious intent. "What do you want her for?"

"I don't want her _for_ anything. She's not a birthday prezzie, Slayer, and not a pawn in some game of mystical chess, either."

Buffy rocked back and planted her hands behind her in the grass. "What is she, then?"

"She's the only person on this whole rotten planet I'm worth anything to," he blurted. "Even if I am just living space." He looked off down the street, avoiding the Slayer's face and the pity that had to be there; _he'd_ pity the bloke that delivered a line like that, if he didn't just eat him for being a pathetic wanker. "It's us against the universe, and I'm not giving her up."

"If she did turn out to be a Slayer, what would you do?"

"She won't," he said, as firmly as though the truth depended on the strength of his conviction. "But if she did, I'd teach her every trick I know. She'd know more about vamps than any Slayer that ever lived, and so long as I was solid she'd never fight alone."

"You wouldn't have to do that," Buffy said, staring down at the hem of her shirt. "She wouldn't _have_ to fight anything. I don't. I _choose_ to fight the baddies and save the world and all the rest of it." She looked up and peered intently at him. "Why would she care about any of that, if you raised her?"

He hadn't even considered that -- he'd had so little time to think at all. "Told you, I like the world. D'like it to carry on a bit longer yet."

It wasn't much of an answer, but she didn't press it. Instead, "What if you got the chip out? Would you turn her?"

"Bloody hell, Slayer! I don't want her dead. I want _her_."

"But if you turned her you'd have a sidekick, Big Bad and Little Bad." She said this casually, as though the conclusion was obvious, easy.

And it was obvious, it was easy, but not the way he thought it should have been. "I don't want her stuck in the shadows with me. I want her to be a bloody seraph, golden and shining." And curse William for needing to get his word in at the worst possible moment.

But Buffy didn't seem to notice the slip into romanticism. "_Why_?" she said, her brow furrowed with bafflement. "What would you want with a, a _seraph_? I don't get it."

He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. With each attempt her eyebrows rose a fraction higher. "She's alive," he said finally.

Pause. "And?"

"And I'm dead!" She looked at him blankly. "Look, there's an order to things: living and dead, light and dark, good and evil, call it what you like. There's the part of the world that's running as it should and the part that's gumming up the works. I'm on the broken side of things, and I like it. S'fun. But she's not broken yet, at least not like I am, and I want her to stay that way. Whole. Falling off the wall's easy enough, but getting put back together again...well, from where I'm standing it's bloody well not going to happen, is it?"

"Your unexpected philosophical depths just got depthier," she said, but her tone was sober. "So why not just give her to the non-broken people?"

"Because they won't love her like I do!" He braced for the denial, but it didn't come. Deflated, he added softly, "I can't give her up." Again he waited, for accusation this time, a finger pointing to say that here was proof that he wasn't fit, that he didn't deserve her. "If it was a question of her life or my dust, it'd be dust every time. But I'm not turning her over to some wanker just because he thinks he's got better idea of her 'welfare' than I do. You'll have to stake me first."

"Okay," Buffy said.

He wasn't sure what he was being told. It must have showed.

"She's yours. I'll tell the others to lay off the baby-stealing talk."

He thought it must be a trick, but the Slayer wasn't much better a liar than him. "You mean it. You won't interfere."

"No interference of the Buffy. Or of the Giles, which is really what you're worried about, right?"

"You're serious."

"Yuh huh." There was a full eye roll implicit in that tone. "But look, if it turns out that she is one of these Potential Slayers, then we'll need to discuss, okay? Because you know how I feel about the Watcher's Council--" She frowned. "Or maybe you don't. Anyway, they and me are totally unmixy, and there's no way I'm letting them get their hands on her.

"But still, if she is, then we'll need to make with some planning."

If she was -- well, he wasn't thinking about that. She wasn't; the question was irrelevent. But if she was...

"All right," he said finally. "But _no stealing_."

"No stealing," she agreed. "And, Spike? Your baby does _not_ need her dad to get dusty for being stupid and evil. I won't stake you unless I have to, and -- here's proof there's an apocalypse coming any minute -- I don't want to have to." Softly, "So please, don't make me."

He'd already used up what little prevaricative skill he had for the night. He looked straight into that steady, serious gaze, and he said, "Right."

"Okay." Her posture loosened and she leaned back on her arms, braced against the grass. The combative glint in her eye faded.

"Okay." He felt like he'd just wrestled a Fyarl -- and won, it seemed. Which pretty much _never_ happened, not in a fair bout. "What are you playing at, Slayer?"

She glanced at him, eyes questioning.

"You're saying me and my superior powers of argumentation just _convinced_ you to let me keep her? Not bloody likely. Since when did you give a rat's arse what I said about anything? Since when did you listen to me at all?"

"Well..." She shrugged. "It's not like there's a handy how-to guide for this -- _The Slayer's Guide to Pregnant Vampires_. And she is sort of yours. I mean, if she were just a baby and not a Slayer or whatever, it's not like anyone else would want her. Poor kid." Her mouth twisted in a sympathetic grimace. "Anyway, I'm not trying to kill something or prevent certain doom, so I don't think it's really a slaying-type mess. It's a...some other kind of mess."

A pause, while he processed this. "That the speech you're giving the Scoobies at large?"

A shift of the shoulders. "More or less."

"And you expect, say, Giles to find it convincing?"

"I'm the Slayer, right? So call this a unilateral Slayer decision." For a bare moment he saw it in her eyes, the burden and the glory both. "They'll be okay with it eventually."

And he believed her. He doubted Giles would yield so easily, but still, he believed her.

Within, his little girl squirmed, maybe in response to the release in tension. He rubbed that spot low under his belly that she seemed to respond to. "S'all right, love, we've got the Slayer looking after us now." Then he caught Buffy's wide-eyed stare, and he slumped. "Bugger."

"You _talk_ to your _stomach_."

"I talk to _her_." He looked off into the distant dark, waiting for peals of girly, un-Slayerlike giggles. When they didn't come, he glanced back to see her lips quirking into a grin.

Before he could react, she leaned over and mock-whispered to his middle, "Don't tell him, but your dad's kind of a dork."

"Hey!"

"But it's okay, you're one of us." She laid a hand on his stomach, palm flat and fingers pointed up. "We'll save you from the dorkiness."

In the last weeks of bemusement she'd watched Dawn pat at him and feel for tiny kicks, but Buffy had never touched him, and now the shiver of having the Slayer that close to something that mattered that much swamped all other thought.

Then he realized why the gesture felt so familiar. "Bloody hell," he breathed.

She snatched her hand away, looked up. "What?"

Well, wasn't this confessional time? Might as well tell it all. "Dream I had. You talked to her, put your hand like that. Said she was one of you lot."

Recollection dawned. "I remember that. Wait -- you were _in_ that dream? _You_ were?"

"It was my dream!"

"So you said at the time," she said, tone amused. Then she snapped her fingers. "That was the First Slayer dream! And you, with the spell--"

"First Slayer dream?"

"You know, the joining spell, to beat Adam? The First Slayer came that night and tried to kill us all in our dreams. Did she slay you?"

Well, that explained a bit. "Didn't pay me any attention. Probably because, as you pointed out, I didn't belong there. I wasn't one of you, after all." He was surprised at the depth of his bitterness at that memory.

It wasn't like he'd ever wanted inside the bumbling circle of evil-squashers that'd named themselves after a kids' show on the telly. Except maybe in a single moment of weakness, after spending most of the last year outside every circle known to man or vamp.

"But you hate us, right?"

He opened his mouth to say of course he did, he loathed every one of them that'd been fouling up his plans since day one. Instead, "Don't really have the energy anymore," he said, hand fallen to his belly again. "Got other concerns now."

"Oh." At his look, "I guess we don't hate you anymore, either. I mean, there's the trying to kill us and all, but..."

"But?"

She shrugged. "Like you said, other concerns. And heck, you haven't tried in, what, at least six months?"

"Twenty-eight weeks," he said softly.


	14. Chapter 14

Spike didn't want to be standing on the Summers' back doorstep, nerving to knock. Joyce Summers made a lovely cup of cocoa and had a knack for ignoring the less respectable aspects of a man's identity, but she also had a bit too keen an eye about some things, and he'd had enough eyes on him lately. Still, in all of Sunnydale she was the only mother he knew, and the sorts of questions he had couldn't be asked of anyone else.

Finally he managed two furtive taps and hoped no one would hear. But then there were footsteps and the door flung inward, and Dawn with arms crossed, lips pressed shut, and one eyebrow arched in a glare.

"Nib -- Dawn," he said. "I'd like a word with your mum, if she's around."

She stepped aside to let him in and shut the door behind him with the force of a teenager in a passion. Then she marched to the kitchen doorway and stood in it, her expression daring him to pass. Instead he looked her in the eye, crossed his arms to match hers, and wondered what snit she'd fallen into and what the bloody hell it had to do with him.

"You left," she said, gravel kicking up in her voice.

He gave the kitchen a roving glance. "Here, aren't I?"

"You didn't even tell me you were going."

Oh. "I didn't really have time, what with the panicking and the fleeing and all." Silence, and no hint of a thaw in that face. Just like her sister. "You know why, don't you?" The shoulders shifted in a bare concession of a shrug that said she didn't, but that there was no possible justification for this desertion. "Was about the little one," he said, motioning to himself. "Thought she was going to stolen away, once she was born. I couldn't let 'em. Only way out seemed to be a swift retreat."

A swallow. "But she's safe now, isn't she?"

"Appears so," he said. "Got your sis's word."

A slow, careful inspection of his face, judging the sincerity therein. Then the shoulders settled, relaxed. The arms dropped. "Well, just don't do it again. Okay?"

"Can't make any promises. But I'll try."

She walked right up to him, snuck her skinny arms under his, and squeezed, and there was nothing to do but hug her back. "You can't go anywhere."

"I'm starting to get that," he said.

She stepped back and said, "I'll get Mom. Who's, like, the only person I ever see, now that I'm grounded for life again." At his blank look, she added with a grimace, "She figured out I wasn't going to Janice's."

"Ah." he said, watching her go. Brilliant. Just in case he hadn't been looking forward to this enough. He slouched against the countertop and tugged his duster a little closer around him, a gesture that was starting to become habitual. Not that it made much difference anymore.

"Spike." Joyce walked in, smile as warm as it had been, well, the one time she hadn't been threatening him. "You must have read my mind -- I was going to have Buffy ask you to come. Take your coat?" She proffered a hand, and he dug his into his pockets.

"D'rather not."

"It's all right, she told me."

"And probably jolly well all of Sunnydale," he mumbled, but he slipped out of the leather. When she took it she met his eyes and smiled, and seemed to be taking special care not to look any farther down.

"Can I get you something?" she said. "I think we have some blood in the fridge -- I keep having to move it."

"It's a rare vamp that turns down blood," he said. "Look, about the Niblet--"

"I am angry with you about Dawn," she said, turning abruptly to him. "I'm angry that you've been encouraging her to lie to me--"

"Didn't exactly take much encouraging!"

"And I'm angry that you took her to another place with demons -- I still haven't gotten over being angry about the last time! And most of all--" He made to cut in again, but she thrust the unopened pint of blood at his chest. "Most of all, I'm angry that you decided to train her in _weapons_ \-- my daughter, fooling around with _knives_ \-- without my permission. That is, is unacceptable, juvenile behavior, and I'm half-inclined to tell you to leave her the hell alone." Her eyes were blazing with that inimitable Summers fire.

"Didn't mean any harm to come to her," he muttered. "Still don't."

"What you mean and what happens aren't always the same thing," she said drily.

He ducked his head, not wanting to see her blame for that royal cock-up with the vamps. Until Dawn'd bawled her eyes out he hadn't even realized what a cock-up it'd been. "She doing all right?" he asked tentatively. "Had herself a bit of a cry the other day--"

"She told me," Joyce said. "I heard about the nightmares, too."

"Well. Good." Good to know it wasn't just his bewildered self privy to those tearful confidences.

She shook her head, turned back to the counter, and set to opening the blood. "Was Dawn what you came to talk about?"

"No. Had a sort of favor to ask you."

She poured the blood into a mug and set it in the microwave. "How much, do you think...?"

"A minute and a half should do it all right."

After beeping the requisite buttons, she said, "So tell me about this favor."

"It, um. Well. Look, did Buffy tell you I'm keeping the little one?"

"She mentioned it." She shot him a glance over her shoulder. "Do you have any idea how you're going to go about doing that?"

"Well." He ran a hand over his hair. "Know there's some things I'll be needing. Clothes and nappies and all that. Things for her to eat."

"So you have some experience with infants."

He had a sudden flashback to one particularly vivid 'experience' and swallowed, hard. "None that'd be, um, useful. Was sort of what I wanted -- thought you might teach me some things for when she comes. You know, baby things." Like how not to kill one when you didn't mean to.

She handed him the warmed mug, the tilt to her brow suggesting she was exercising maternal telepathy on him. "Buffy says you live in a crypt."

"Yeah. Nice place, really, still needs a bit of work--"

"Is it heated?"

"Could probably get a space heater in," though that'd likely foul the circuit to the fridge.

"Running water?"

"You'd be surprised what a wrench and a tap into the city pipes can do," he said. He'd been rather pleased with himself over that bit of plumbing ingenuity.

But Joyce was looking at him with something cousin to pity. "Spike."

He blocked her gaze with the mug and sucked the blood down -- not quite the right temperature, nearer 85 degrees than the preferred 98.6, but soothingly warm all the same.

"A crypt is no place for a child. I wouldn't have guessed a vampire would up to parenting, either--"

Spike eyed her sharply over the top of the mug.

"--but Buffy says you're determined."

"M'not worried." He peered down at the last thin film of blood. When the weight of her silence grew too heavy, he added, "I'm just a bit...terrified, is all. And don't you go telling anyone I said that," he said, fixing her with a glare that had set minions trembling, back in those good old days when he _had_ minions.

A bit of a smile ghosted across her face, and was gone. "Why don't we go sit down?" she said, leading him into the living room and motioning him towards the sofa. Joyce sat opposite him, set her water glass on the coffee table, and folded her hands in her lap. "You don't have one single idea what you're doing, having this baby."

"I bloody so have an idea! I told the Slayer, I've been reading up. There's stupid cow-eyed bints without a half-ounce of sense in their skulls, having sprogs and raising them up. If they can manage it, then it can't be impossible for me. And if it is--" He faltered. "If it is, then I'll figure it out anyway."

"Children aren't pets, Spike. You can't leave some food out and check once in a while to make sure they haven't chewed up the furniture. For the first while, taking care of her will be practically a full-time job. Are you prepared for that?"

"I'll make it work," he said.

"But you don't have to make it work by yourself."

"Oh, don't I. Well, color me bloody relieved. Slayer's found her way to letting me keep the chit, so kind of her, but I hardly see her dropping by the crypt to change nappies. Willow's nice enough, and her Tara bird, too...suppose they might lend a hand now and again. The rest of the tribe'd be more likely to come list all the reasons why the vampire hasn't any business with a little one, just on the chance that I've forgotten any from the last time. And the Niblet--" He considered the purloined books, the blood bought with allowance money, the excitement ready to bubble over at any mention of his little girl. "She'd be a help if she could, I'd guess, except I'd heard the rumor that she wasn't to step foot outside the house for the rest of her natural life."

Joyce sat serenely through this tirade, sipping from her water glass, and when it was over she said, "I think you should move in with us."

Of the myriad reasonable responses to this unreasonable statement, he chose, "Say again?"

"The basement is a mess right now, but I don't need all those boxes anyway -- I haven't opened some of them since the move. We can find you a bed and make the rest into a nursery. It'll be a bit...rustic, but it is heated, and there's the bathroom upstairs."

He'd never thought Joyce Summers was entirely sane -- no sane woman would offer a vampire cocoa and then not just listen as he poured out his woes in a drunken flood, but actually sympathize. It wasn't done.

Nor was this.

"You're not serious," he said.

"My daughters would tell you that this is definitely my serious voice," she said.

"The Slayer wouldn't have me under her roof."

"_My_ roof, actually."

He shook his head and started to speak.

"And besides," Joyce said, "I've already talked to her about it. That's why I wanted to see you."

"And?"

Now the smile settled into her lips and stayed. "She said something about it being easier to keep an eye on you here."

He snorted. "Figures." A moment, while he considered his knuckles. "For how long?"

"I was thinking at least until the baby's sleeping through the night -- or the day, I suppose, if she's following your schedule?"

He shrugged. The question had never even occurred to him before.

"And then after that, I think it'll depend on you."

"Meaning what? Meaning if I don't corrupt one Summers girl and piss the other off past the staking point, you might extend the invitation?"

"That, too. But I really meant it'd depend on your financial situation."

Now she'd lost him.

"I'll be happy to turn over some hand-me-downs and do some babysitting and even clear out the basement for you, but supporting her is _your_ responsibility. You're going to need reliable income."

"Figured on that."

"_Legal_ income, if you stay here."

So much for the breaking and entering. "I don't exactly carry a green card."

"I mean something that isn't going to lead the nice policemen to my house."

"Not in the habit of leading them anywhere." She folded her arms and looked at him. "Do you even know what you're asking? Vampire, here. A sodding pathetic one of late, I'll grant you -- can't bite, can't kill anything but demons, haven't shagged anything at all in I don't want to think about how long. And now you're telling me I can't nick things?"

"Would that be so terrible?"

He scowled at the carpet. Finally, "I used to be scary, you know."

She gave him a warm, patient look, as to a five-year-old who'd just yelled 'Boo!' from beneath a white sheet. He'd have been irritated except for the fact that, as far as he could tell, he never had been scary to her -- not that he'd really tried.

He heaved a sigh. "Fine. If the law and I come to a procedural disagreement, the little one and I'll clear out."

"No, Spike. That's fine for a, a bachelor vampire, but your little girl is going to need a safe, stable environment."

It occurred to him that if Joyce and Giles ever faced off, his money'd be on the lady. "All right. No nicking, either."

"That means you _are_ coming?"

"I--" He looked at her, this keen-eyed, soft-voiced woman who invited vampires and their experimental offspring to stay.

All at once the lines of tension drawing him taut collapsed, and he was bent over his knees with his face in his hands. "Bloody hell," he mumbled. He'd already been as much a ponce in front of her, a year and a half ago, as he could ever aspire to; it wasn't as if he had much image left to lose.

To prove it, her hand, warm and scented of almonds, settled on his shoulder and squeezed.

"You'll show me, yeah?" he whispered. "All those things I missed, being male -- washing her and putting her to bed and keeping the germs away?" The books had been very stern on the subject of germs. "I don't know any of it."

"It's not imprinted on us at birth," she said, her tone wryly amused. He glanced up. "I called my mother every day for at least six months after Buffy was born -- worrying about every sniffle, asking if she was crying too much or not enough, what to do when she started teething."

"Yeah?" He considered that, and felt a few scales of worry slough away. "S'not hopeless, is what you're saying."

"It's not."

Relief, he decided. That's what was rolling through him in waves. "When am I moving in?" he asked carefully, just in case he'd hallucinated the last twenty minutes.

"How about, as soon as we find you a bed?"

He shrugged. "All right."

"Good." She reached down and clasped his room-temperature hands in her living ones. "I'm glad." And, looking at her, he decided that she was.

So.

So he wasn't doing this all by himself.

All right, then.


	15. Chapter 15

"I'm not taking the Slayer to my sodding doctor's appointment!" When he'd dropped by at dusk to ask Joyce about it, he'd expected her to simply refuse. This was quite possibly worse.

"Dawn isn't going without her," said Joyce, her voice level and even and brooking no argument whatsoever.

"This is _personal_," Spike said. "I don't need her goggling while the doc feels me up." It was little comfort that Buffy looked only marginally more thrilled about this idea than he was.

"If I'm not comfortable that Dawn will be safe, then she's not going."

"Hello, bloody slayer of Slayers here," he said, before remembering that this wasn't perhaps his best credential in present company. "I'll take care of her."

"Spike," Joyce said, voice soft with admonishment. "It's not just her you're protecting. You're vulnerable now. If it was a question of saving your daughter or saving Dawn, which would you choose?"

"I--" He glanced at Dawn, who was watching Joyce anxiously. "I'd see they were both all right." Then he winced, recalling how well he'd managed that the last time. "Besides, it's neutral ground -- there won't be anything she'll need protecting from."

"Which is the only reason I'd consider letting her go at all, especially since she is still _grounded_." Joyce gave Dawn a sharp glance before looking back to Spike. "Now, you take Buffy as a bodyguard, or you go by yourself."

Dawn folded her arms and glanced between Buffy and himself, her mouth set in a line that promised a tantrum directed at whichever of them turned her down.

Tantrum aside, he wanted her along, for... well, for company. Oh, how the mighty were fallen. He shrugged a sigh. "Slayer?"

Buffy still looked slightly shell-shocked, but she managed to roll her eyes. "Fine. Hey, it could be fun!" Chirpy voice aside, she looked like she very much doubted it. "Maybe I can at least kill something while we're there."

The office was never going to schedule him an appointment again.

~*~*~

"The Chosen One, that's me," Buffy said, climbing into the DeSoto next to Dawn. "The one girl in all the world called to escort her sister and a pregnant vampire to the doctor's office. _So_ not in the Slayer handbook."

Spike turned and stared. "There's a handbook?"

"So they tell me." Buffy shrugged. "Giles only mentions it when I'm not being 'proper' enough. He could be making it up."

"Bloody hell, Slayer, do you have any idea what that'd be worth on the black market?"

She looked over at him with the skepticism of someone who not only had never had such an idea occur to her, but who held deep suspicion for anyone to whom it did.

He sighed. "Never mind."

The office was one he'd passed dozens of times on his prowls, and never given any notice to -- just one more door in a long line of doors leading to accountants and mortgage brokers and other such people that an unchipped vampire had only one use for, and a chipped vampire no use at all. Inside, he and Dawn settled into chairs so stiff and upright they must have been designed to prevent loitering. Buffy turned a full one-eighty, eyeing the potted plants and the blandly idyllic watercolors as if a demon might spring from one of them at any moment. Probably she thought one would. Finally she caught his amused glance on her and sat down, flushing and looking annoyed about it.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" she asked around Dawn in a harsh half-whisper.

"Sl-- Buffy," he stumbled, remembering how very much he didn't want to advertise who he was with. "D'ya think all demons like muck and slime?"

"But the receptionist looks human."

_Vampire_, he instantly thought, and snapped around to stare at the woman, sniffing. But she didn't smell of either blood or arrested decay, but of tropical spices and an undercurrent of kerosene. He relaxed and shook his head. "Look at her eyes."

They were the typical Shiraka color, gold, with vertically slitted pupils, and after Buffy squinted at the woman a moment, she settled back in her seat, looking nettled.

Another human-looking woman -- fortyish, graying, spectacled, and wearing a crisp white lab coat -- opened the door next to the receptionist station. "Spike?"

He pushed himself up and followed, Dawn stuck leechlike at his side, and after a moment Buffy trotted behind them. Probably had to roll her eyes at the universe first, he thought.

Pleasantries: I'm Dr. Mack but you can call me Stacey, so glad your friends could come with you, now tell me what I can do for you. A summary of Spike's Initiative history commenced, with occasional tongue-clucking from Stacey -- apparently he wasn't her first patient with Initiative horror stories. Then a few silent minutes spent while Stacey looked over the specs Willow'd printed out for Spike to bring.

Finally, Stacey cleared her throat and said, "You have to understand, I would never recommend an artificial hosting arrangement like this without much more regular care than you've had so far."

"Do you--" He searched the carefully professional face for sign of bad news, but couldn't read what he saw. "Do you think there could be something wrong with her?"

"I'll need to have a closer look at you both before I can say."

He licked his lips. "I didn't even know about her for months, and then I didn't know I was keeping her, and anyway it's not like the bastards handed over an instruction manual." But he should have bloody _known_ she'd be needing...things, before now. Supplements, or whatever the lab coats would have given her if he hadn't run off.

Stacey gave him a warm, soothing, entirely uninformative smile. "Let's have a look at you, and then hopefully I'll know something useful," she said. "Here we go." She slid his much-oversized t-shirt up his chest.

"Oh my God," Buffy said. He turned to see her gaze stuck on his belly, rounded and swollen like rising dough. "You really are pregnant."

"Did you think he was faking?" said Dawn, scowling at her.

"No! No. I just..." She trailed off helplessly.

"S'all right," Spike said. "Takes a bit of getting used to." He watched Buffy's gaze flick from his stomach to his eyes and back, and he found that, all expectations to the contrary, he simply didn't care. He was beyond obvious now and verging on bloody conspicuous, he still had two and half months to go -- to grow, suggested a cheeky voice in his head -- and yet his increasingly bizarre profile ranked down somewhere near chipped nail polish on his list of concerns.

Stacey glanced between him and Buffy and, apparently deciding that the moment was done, began looking him over and hmm-hmming in various nerve-rattling tones. Then she laid a stethoscope bulb flat on his stomach and listened for a moment. She shook her head with a hint of a smile. "Much easier to hear the heartbeat when there's nothing competing," she said, handing him the stethoscope.

Cautiously he put the knobs in his ears. That was what the flutter sounded like, then -- not wing beats at all, but a steady swish-swish at the same brisk tempo. He gave the instrument to Dawn, who immediately squealed. "Buffy, you have to hear this!"

"Really not," Buffy said, her arms folded across her chest and her eyes still wide. She flashed Spike an apologetic glance that he read as, 'Sorry, not done being weirded out yet.'

Now Stacey was spreading colorless jelly over Spike's stomach. This was what he'd been waiting for, what he'd been staring at Dawn's book in anticipation of for weeks now. Dawn must have guessed; she rested a hand on his arm and watched while Stacey arranged the machine. A bit of muttering, a bit of tickling with the wand, and on the black screen appeared that ghostly pale portrait he only dimly remembered from last time.

There she was.

Eye. Ear. Nose. A tangled splotch of white that might have been a hand. A whole _person_ nestled warm and snug in his belly.

His little girl.

Someone was pushing at his shoulder. "Spike!"

He shook out of his daze to glare at Buffy. "What's your bloody problem?"

Her lips were pursed less in annoyance than amusement. It was almost a soft expression, not one he ever expected her to direct at him. "You weren't listening," she said.

"Oh. Well," he fumbled. "Busy."

"As I was saying," Stacey said, "You definitely have a girl." She gestured vaguely at a few indecipherable squiggles on the screen. "And I don't see any apparent deformities."

"Was that a possibility?" Buffy, asking the question sticking in Spike's throat.

Stacey must have heard the edge in Buffy's voice; she glanced between Buffy and Spike and said, "This is an experimental procedure. Prototypical, even. Nothing is guaranteed."

"But she's all right," Spike pressed.

"As I said, no apparent deformities." He had to be content with that while Stacey hummed a bit more, and then laid the instrument down and turned off the machine. She scribbled awhile on a chart, and the humming switched to mumbling so garbled even his vampire hearing couldn't sort it out. Finally, she nodded towards Buffy and asked Spike, "Do you want them here while I talk to you?"

He shrugged. "Might as well. Not like I have any secrets," he added sourly, glancing at Buffy.

"All right, then." The woman pulled up a chair and sat. "Spike, she isn't dangerously undersized for a 28-week-old, but she's smaller than I'd like. This... hosting arrangement--" She gestured dismissively at him. "--is ingenious in theory, but in practice it depends on your eating well and regularly. Have you?"

"It's been a bit of a challenge," he said, "what with the being chipped--"

"Excuses are very comforting things to have, but they do your parasite no good at all. What kind of blood? Human?"

"Um." He cast Buffy a wary glance, and she looked coolly back, eyebrow lifted.

"If you can't be honest in front of your friends, then they should leave," Stacey said.

"Pigs' blood, mostly," Spike muttered. "There's been some human. Not live!" he added to Buffy. "From the hospital or from Willy's, and Willy's supplier doesn't kill -- waste of resources."

Buffy's sour look suggested she found this last only marginally reassuring.

"In that case," Stacey said, "I think you should switch as much to human as you can -- this 'filter' you have installed should be able to use the nutrients more effectively."

"Aren't you human?" Buffy blurted, and Spike closed his eyes. Here it came. "How can you tell him he should be eating people?"

Stacey turned that cool professional gaze on her. "First, I am three-quarters human, one-quarter Bracken demon, not that that is in any way your concern. Second, my lineage doesn't excuse me from providing the best possible care to my patients. And third, it isn't necessary that Spike 'eat people,' only that he consume their blood."

"Think what the-- what Buffy's saying is that supply's going to be a bit of an issue."

She looked at him thoughtfully. "I'm not saying your parasite couldn't survive without it, and I'm not positive a change of diet will make a significant difference--"

"She's not a parasite," said Dawn suddenly, looking mulish. "She's a baby."

Stacey pushed her glasses further up her nose and said, "I'm sorry. Of course she is. You'll have to excuse me -- parasitic health is my specialty, after all."

Dawn folded her arms and mumbled something unintelligible.

Turning back to Spike, Stacey said, "But for the child's sake I'd much rather see you eating human than not -- professional opinion."

"Well. We'll sort out something then."

"Spike," Buffy said warningly.

"I'm not starving her, Slayer!"

Dawn sucked in a breath at that, just about the time Spike realized what he'd said. He snuck a furtive glance at the doctor, who shook her head in what might have been amusement. "I already knew she was the Slayer. How many Buffys do you think there are in Sunnydale?"

Spike and Buffy glanced at each other. He shrugged and said to Stacey, "Anything else I should know?"

"Otherwise, she appears to be perfectly healthy. Either these experimenters were absurdly good at what they were doing, or you're extremely fortunate. Take your pick." She paused while Spike took a few sharp, relieved breaths. "About the birth," she said. "There's a local surgeon that visits the clinic on a circuit; we can make an appointment with him if you like, at an appropriate date. Or you can go into L.A."

"Here," he said automatically -- no reason to venture from home if he could help it. And then the words hit him: the _birth_. The kind with mess and calm doctors and anxious lookers-on -- and scalpels in his case, rather than contractions, for which he was suddenly and profoundly grateful. And afterwards...

Well, after all that he'd have her, and it came to him that until this very moment he'd never quite believed it. Giles' posturing, Buffy's promises, Joyce's comforting smiles, the ever more athletic internal gymnastics: just speeches and temporary oddities in an existence full of such. All his worries just fever dreams until now, under the clinical brilliance of fluorescents.

"Here," he repeated, and took in a breath that felt like it might have been his first. He could feel a grin like a canyon cracking his face. "I want her to be born here."

~*~*~

Afterwards, Buffy strode straight inside, muttering something about changing for patrol, and Spike said he'd catch a quick chat with 'the mum of the house.' Dawn settled onto the front step to wait. In a few minutes he was back, whistling, his saunter slowing to a stop as he came up behind her. She kept on staring at the gnome in the Flores' flowerbed.

Finally came the click of his lighter. "Expecting someone?" he said.

"No," she said shortly. Just because she wanted to talk to him didn't mean she wanted to _talk_ to him. Which didn't make sense, quite, even to her, but there was a vampire _moving into her house_ any day now, and the fact that it was Spike only made things muddier.

Without further comment, he sat at the other end of the step. He leaned back against the post, one hand resting comfortably on his stomach. His other elbow was propped up on his knee, the cigarette hanging from between his fingers. Dawn had had misgivings about the sweatpants, and the huge t-shirt really didn't do much for him, but he was, she decided, still the coolest pregnant guy alive. Or not alive, depending.

Then she coughed on a cloud of smoke that blew into her face. "Yuck, Spike. Don't you think you should quit?"

He stared at her like she'd told him to paint his nose purple. "What for?"

"For the baby."

"What about her? Near as I can gather from Red, it can't hurt her any. Damn 'filter.'"

"You know, secondhand smoke? People can get cancer from secondhand smoke."

He scowled intently at his cigarette. "Your mum's already laid down the law about smoking in the house."

"But the smell sort of sticks to you."

"That be enough to hurt her?"

"Probably." She couldn't remember if Mr. Ramirez had actually said that in health class, but a smell that bad couldn't be good for you.

"'Probably.' Fragile bloody humans." He gave the cigarette one more glance and stuck it deliberately back in his mouth. "Got a lot of smoking to do in the next twelve weeks, then."

"Yuck," she said again.

She sat listening to the crickets and wondering when he'd ask her why she'd been waiting for him -- she knew he knew she had, whatever she'd said. But he just looked off down the street, breath catching every so often.

"So you're moving in with us," she said finally.

"That all right with you?" he asked, in that soft, careful voice like he thought _she_ was fragile.

"I guess so." A long moment of him not looking at her. "I didn't think Buffy'd want a vampire living in the house."

A soft snort. "Didn't really think so either."

"But you're still an _evil_ vampire, right?"

Now he turned to regard her with that attentive seriousness that made her feel like an adult -- which scared her, a little, in a gray, distant sort of way that was nothing like being afraid of fangs. "We're all evil, pet."

"So you still want to, like, eat people."

"S'not even the same question -- 'do I like to eat people.' S'like saying, 'do you like ice cream.'"

"That's not the same," she said flatly.

"Sure it is. What's your favorite flavor?"

"Jalapeño," she said, despite herself.

A tiny bit of a grin started at one corner of his mouth and spread to his entire face. "I knew I liked you."

She basked in that glow for just a moment. "So..."

"S'like this. You like most all kinds of ice cream--"

"Not vanilla bean." Off his raised eyebrow, "It has little black specks in it."

"Uh huh. So, you like most kinds, but jalapeño's your favorite because -- well, just because it is, right? And somebody says, eating jalapeño ice cream's evil."

"Ice cream is not people!"

"And you, bein' a good little human, say 'All right, I won't eat the jalapeño ice cream, 'cause it'd be the wrong thing,' and, bein' a good little human, you care about that. Sometimes." His lip quirked.

"But it doesn't change you wanting it, does it? Still think about tasting it, feeling the pepper flavor burnin' down your throat. Probably even resent not getting' to eat it, because it's a bit arbitrary, innit, just that one bein' off limits? And it's not like you _picked_ it for your favorite, just was, sure as you're you. Not your fault at all. Whether you're evil or not evil, eating it or not eating it, you still _want_ to."

He sat back and sucked on his cigarette, looking off down the street again but at a near enough angle that she could tell he was watching her out of the corner of his eye.

"So, that's like blood for you," Dawn said finally.

"_Human_ blood, if you multiply about a hundred times over. And pigs' blood's the sodding vanilla bean."

"And you still want to eat people." She'd thought -- well, that was stupid. She'd thought he was sort of...good, now. And that still meant not wanting to eat people, it seemed to her.

"S'not even a choice, love. Vampire. Couldn't help it even if I got slapped with one of Angel's nancy gypsy curses -- Dru preserve me."

"But Angel didn't--"

He turned abruptly to her. "Every minute you were within smelling distance, your blood was singin' to him. He could have drunk you dry and loved every drop of it, and the only difference between him and any other vamp in existence is he'd have brooded about it in the morning."

"So my blood sings to you, too." Like what, she wondered. Like the Hallelujah chorus? Like the lead for one of those weird old rock bands he liked?

His face fell slack and expressionless. "Yeah."

"But you wouldn't actually eat me. Even if you could."

"Said I wouldn't," he said, almost sulky.

She pressed at her neck, up just below her ear, where her pulse throbbed slow and steady against her fingers. She didn't usually think about her blood any more than she thought about her stomach, except when it gurgled, or about her brain not _quite_ sloshing around in her skull.

But he did -- he'd noticed her gesture and was staring at her fingers like she might burst a vein if he kept watching. And then he caught her eye on him and turned abruptly away, a muscle twitching just below his jaw.

So there was wanting and there was wanting, she thought, and it _did_ make sense.

She reached along the step to squeeze his hand: cool, and softer than she'd have thought for a big, bad guy like Spike, at least before she'd known him. "Thanks."

He glanced skeptically down and back at her as she withdrew her hand. "What was that for, then?" he asked softly.

For not wanting, she thought. But what she said was, "Nobody else ever tells me stuff."

"You're feeling warm fuzzies because the vamp says you smell like dinner?"

She shrugged.

He slouched back and shook his head, chuckling. "You're _all_ insane. The whole Summers clan."

There was something in the statement, not the actual words but the easy way he said them, that drew her eyes to his face. His smirk was faint, the usual cockier-than-thou thing that she'd tried in the mirror once or twice but never quite got the hang of. The scarred eyebrow was angled just a little bit higher than its usual tilt.

But then she widened her focus and realized it was his whole body talking -- the fall of his fingers, the angle he made with the porch post.

She'd never seen him so relaxed before, so loose.

"Do I suit?" he asked, amusement in his eyes.

"Was it a good day?"

He blinked. "Well enough, I s'pose. Why?"

"You look... happy."

"Yeah?" A lazy grin drifted across his mouth. "Might as well. Went to see the doc this evening, 'cause you know, there's this sodding unnatural growth in my stomach, s'had me a bit worried." He folded his hands behind his head. "Turns out, I'm having a baby."


	16. Chapter 16

Three days after the doctor's visit, Spike opened his crypt door right around sunset to Willow and Tara, all grins, with Xander hanging moodily behind.

"We found you a bed," Willow said.

"More of a futon, actually," Tara added. "O-one of the RA's in my building was going to l-leave it by the dumpster."

"But we caught him! We're going to go tie it on top of Xander's car -- that's why he's here."

Xander lifted his head in a nod that approximated a greeting.

"And we figured you'd want to come, so you could see it."

" 'We,' " Spike said, warily.

"Well, Tara and I figured."

"_I_ said mooches can't be choosers," Xander said.

He eyed them all -- Willow, pleased as punch to be pulling a bed out of her hat even if it had technically been her lovely assistant who'd found the hat; said lovely assistant brightened by that shy smile; Xander with his uneasy half-glower -- and shrugged. "Yeah, all right."

They filed out, Spike pulling the outer door shut behind him. Tara fell back to walk at his side. "So, h-how's the baby?"

He cast a wry glance downward. "Growing."

The smile widened. "And how are you?"

"Um." He tried to think when in the last very long while he'd needed an answer to that question, and what the answer had been. He couldn't remember. "Not panicking?"

"Good," she said, nodding approval.

Willow pulled Tara into the back seat before Spike had time to state a preference. He stretched out in the front passenger seat and caught Xander's eye on him. Pulling a feral grin, he laid a hand very deliberately over his stomach. Xander's convulsive shudder was perhaps a bit more theatrical than called for.

"I really don't like this idea," he said.

"Xander," said Willow warningly.

"Now, now." Spike said. "A man's allowed his prejudices in home furnishings. I'm opposed to Barcaloungers, personally."

"I mean this whole you living with Buffy thing."

"Yeah, what with her being so helpless and all, and me with, what, my deadly glare? My rapier wit? Mortal peril, she's in."

"But you could, like, burn the house down."

"With me in it?"

"Well, you'd do it from outside."

"Yeah, having forgone the pleasure umpteen times in the last two and a half years, I'm going to torch the place when I actually live there." Which last statement still sounded surreal.

"It's no good." He patted Xander's shoulder and heaved a sigh. "I know you miss me, sweetheart, but I just can't bear to come back to you."

"Gah!"

Behind them, Willow snickered.

"So, _so_ not dignifying that with a response. At all. Ever."

"Ooh, Xander, you'd better not tell Anya," Willow said. "She'd wish your insides onto your outsides -- or else she'd do something _really_ icky."

"Really not an issue, Will."

"Y-you're not implying anything about gay people, are you?" said Tara. "Because I m-might have to be offended."

"And I am now not speaking to anyone in this car." Xander shot Spike a glare. "Your. Fault."

Smirking, Spike turned to watch Sunnydale suburbia roll past the window. So this was what not panicking felt like. God, it felt good.

At the dorm, he decided to let the thinner, less pregnant members of the party do the talking. He hung back by the car until Willow called him over, and together he and Xander hauled the bed on top of the vehicle and tied it down. While the girls finished chatting up the fellow -- about the unexpected deaths of psychology tutors, from the sound of it -- Spike lit a cigarette.

"I'm serious," Xander said, sidling next to him. "You hurt Buffy, or any of them--"

"--and I'm an asthma attack waiting to happen. I've heard it before."

"There won't be enough _left_ of you to give anyone asthma."

"Noted."

"And the not hurting thing? That also goes for, for--" Xander contrived to gesture towards Spike's middle without actually looking at it. "Her, whoever she is."

Spike cocked his head. "Much obliged, you concerning yourself with her welfare."

Xander scowled at the tarmac. "She doesn't deserve it -- being stuck with you for a dad."

Spike regarded him, this flop-haired puppy of a boy not yet grown into his feet, and felt an alien and entirely undesirable pang of sympathy. "And you shouldn't have gotten that scar on your ear."

Xander turned on Spike, right fist drawn back and ready for the blow. "That was an accident," he said thickly, and then he gave a startled glance over his shoulder to the girls, chatting far beyond earshot.

"Sure, the bottle bein' broken was an accident. He hit you on purpose."

"Just that once. Dad never--" Xander gave a frustrated huff and lowered his hand. "That was years ago. How do you even know this?"

"Doesn't take a vampire to hear your mum and dad trading old blames. You just don't notice it anymore." Spike took a last drag off his cigarette. "And my little one didn't deserve getting cooked up in some military experiment, either. Way of the world."

"But you don't even have a soul. You like to kill people! How are _you_ going to be any good for her?"

Tara was waving a farewell to the fellow, Willow already headed back.

"Well." Spike flicked the butt to the ground. "Maybe I won't. But I'm going to bloody try." He stared Xander in the eye until Xander looked away, and then he ducked down into the car.

~*~*~

They already had the futon's iron frame halfway up the walk when Spike heard Buffy's adamant protests overlying Giles' cultured rumble.

"What's the holdup?" said Xander.

"Nothing," Spike said, and started backing towards the door again. "Just a wanker I didn't want to see," he added under his breath. It had to happen sometime, but he'd had this pleasant image of Giles already taken firmly in hand by the time Spike had to face him again.

Nearer the door, in frustrated British tones, "The Council--"

"The Council kidnapped my mother, tied her up, and left her for a vampire to eat." Well, _that_ was interesting. "Don't talk to me about the Council. I trust Spike with her way before I'd trust them."

Spike felt behind him for the doorknob and shoved the door open.

"They just want someone they can shoot at demons with. At least he -- Spike!"

"Don't mind us," he told them as Xander stumped in at the futon's other end. "We're just the help. Carry on."

"It's your bed," grumbled Xander. "_I'm_ the help."

"At least you've found your proper place in life," Spike said, fumbling the basement door open.

"Buffy," Giles began again, "It's a very noble sentiment, but..."

Fortunately the basement's concrete walls muffled things a little. "Here, I guess," said Spike, easing his end of the futon to the floor while Xander did the same. Spike glanced around. It didn't look like Joyce had gotten to moving any of those extra boxes yet. There'd definitely be some tidying needed, and maybe a few more shelves for putting away some of the detritus of three human existences.

"Here are the cushions!" said Willow, hidden beneath the largest of them. Tara trooped down behind her with two more.

"S'pose those should go on the bed," Spike said.

"I bet Buffy's mom'll give you some sheets," Willow said. "And a pillow."

"Probably," Spike agreed, distracted.

"So, I'm gonna go now," Xander said, a half-question inflected in his tone. "Anya'll be around any minute."

"Yeah. Yeah. Guess that's all to be done for now." He rubbed at the back of his neck with one hand. Eyeing a ceiling beam, he said, "Um. Obliged for the help."

"No problem," Willow said brightly.

"Of course it wasn't," Xander grumbled as he followed her up the stairs. "You didn't have to carry that thing. Or use any gas. Or..."

Tara still stood at his elbow. "You're welcome," she said.

"Yeah," Spike said awkwardly. "Thanks." She gave him one of those soft smiles that, now that he thought about it, reminded him of Joyce. Probably she'd be a good mother, this girl. Kind to a fault.

And she'd caught him staring off into space again. "A-are you okay?"

He dug his hands into his duster pockets. "S'just...not what I figured, you know?"

"The basement?"

"No. The...all of it." His gesture encompassed the room and the house above -- strident argument still murmuring distantly from it -- and the whole world beyond. "Not complaining, mind you. Wouldn't trade it -- wouldn't trade _her_ for anything. Even Dru."

She hummed questioningly.

"Old girlfriend," he said.

"W-were you together a long time?"

A snort. "Could say that. Still miss her." Had she known about what she'd sent him to? He shrugged the thought away. "But this..." He glanced down, running his hand lightly over his stomach. "Never saw this coming. Or this," he added, gaze roving the unfinished ceiling.

"If they'd known how hard I'd be to get rid of, think they might've just have staked me as soon as I came knocking that first time. Or," he added wryly, "maybe I'd have saved them the trouble."

"But you w-wouldn't now," she said, tone sharp with uncertain alarm.

"Nah." He grinned reassuringly. "Got too nice a set-up now. Got things to live for." It was as close as he'd ever come to mentioning that one ghastly, desperate, Hawaiian-printed afternoon. He'd have fallen in a howl of dust and never even known about the other life he was ending.

He must have shuddered, or made a sound, because Tara's hand was on his arm and she was smiling sweet encouragement up at him.

And the sight of her face seemed to be the last ingredient to a thought that'd been brewing for he couldn't guess how long. "That's what the dream was about, wasn't it?"

"The-- oh! D-did you figure it out?"

He grimaced as it sunk in. "Bloody Hallmark bollocks."

"Oh?" A laugh twitched at the corner of her mouth, fighting to get out.

Now he was sorry he'd said anything, but the glint in Tara's eye suggested she might tease it out of him if he tried to beg off. "She's my heartbeat, isn't she?" He felt it again, the shudder of something long dead convulsing to life in his chest. "My sodding 'higher purpose' in life." He looked sharply in Tara's face, daring her to laugh now, but all he saw was her usual grave interest.

"Well," he said. "Enough maundering, yeah? Think Joyce said something about there bein' one more pouch of blood in that fridge."

But the voices overhead sharpened as they climbed the stairs, and Spike was already bored of it all by the time he reached the first floor. Buffy and Giles were still the featured combatants, but accompanied by occasional sparring among all the other parties -- Willow and Xander, and Anya had arrived by the smell of it. Dawn's scent was drifting down from the top of the upper staircase, and he was mildly surprised that she hadn't jumped to his defense by now.

Slip out the back door? Or endure the tedious wrath of Scoobies splitting moral hairs?

Even as he dithered, Riley Finn pushed the front door open.

"Bugger," Spike said dismally.

"Riley!" Buffy bounded out of the living room and into those hay-baling Midwestern arms. "How was Iowa?"

"Good. Peaceful." He peered first into the living room, where the assembled mass was no doubt scowling at each other energetically, and then shook his head and grinned down at her. "Very peaceful. You'd have been bored out of your mind."

"Nothing to slay?"

"Even the mosquitoes were undersized this year." Finally his glance traveled back to Spike, and caught. "Buffy..."

She dropped to her feet, peered around to see what Riley was looking at, and frowned a ferocious Slayer frown -- not so much at Spike, he didn't think, but at the universe at large. "Yeah, there's sort of been some stuff happening while you were gone." She drew Riley towards the living room, favoring Spike with a scowl that clearly said, 'Stay.'

"S-should we go sit down?" Tara said.

"Do you want to?" Spike asked, skeptical.

"Not really. I'm n-not very good with conflict."

Riley's disbelieving baritone had joined the chorus, and suddenly Spike had had quite enough. He stalked down the hall and around the corner, and pulled up before the crowd -- rather too many, really, to fit comfortably in the Summers' living room.

His abrupt appearance was enough to win him a moment's silence. He looked them all over: Giles grimacing, Joyce standing tall and thin-lipped, Riley staring at him, looking vaguely sickened. Then he laid his hands deliberately over his stomach and said, "She's _mine_. She didn't start out that way, but she is now. She's _my_ daughter--" oh, how sweet that word was "--and I'm going to take care of her, and I don't really care what you lot think about it." Which was a bluff, a declaration of war without a single weapon to back it except his sometime-ally, Miss Army of One.

But now the faces were turning to each other, half in confusion and half in chagrin -- except for Anya, who was reading a magazine -- and even Giles looked mildly chastened. What, had this all been some dry ethical exercise before? Bloody humans.

Disgusted, he spun to go before anyone had a chance to aim their objections at him, and nearly ran into Tara. She sidestepped the same direction he did, fluster rising in her face as she tried to get out of his way.

"Spike!" Willow, come to mend things. Of course.

Sighing, he turned and fixed her with a glare. "What?"

"It's okay. Right, guys?" She glanced back to the assemblage with a glare of her own.

All but Anya turned to Giles, and he surveyed them all and sighed. "I cannot approve," he said slowly. "But... but I understand that it is not my decision."

As Spike watched, Buffy turned to each spectator in turn. Joyce lifted an eyebrow and glanced towards Giles with open scorn. Xander shrugged grudging acceptance. Leaning against the sofa with arms crossed, Riley's shrug conveyed less acceptance and more a delay in judgment. Last Buffy lingered on Giles, and what passed between them before Giles cleared his throat and removed his glasses for polishing, Spike couldn't begin to guess.

Buffy turned back to Spike with a gaze of impenetrable hazel, and said, "He stays. And so does the baby."

It felt as though the whole house sighed, in varying degrees of frustration and relief.

"Okay, so, so you're moving in," Willow said to him, managing to convey an impressive amount of uncertainty in that observation. "And now you have a bed. So, we should go get the rest of your stuff, shouldn't we?"

"And by 'we' you mean us," Xander said, "and by 'go get,' you mean additional unpaid mileage in the Xandermobile. In which Anya and I are supposed to be riding to the movie in--" He glowered at his watch. "--negative five minutes."

"You should help Spike," Anya said, looking up from her magazine at last. "It's what friends and neighbors do. And later," she added with a gleam, "you can make it up to me. That'll probably be even better than the movie."

Spike waited for Xander to explain with some heat that Spike was neither a neighbor nor a friend. It wasn't as though Spike couldn't use the DeSoto at his convenience. But after a moment Xander shrugged and said, "So, do you wanna get the rest of your stuff?"

It didn't take long; after a lingering glance over the crypt, Spike decided that of his few possessions only the mini-fridge and a few odds-and-ends -- razor, spare t-shirts -- were worthy of life in an actual house. He also swiped Dawn's knives and the throwing target, and made sure he'd collected, again, all the books she'd brought him. That was it: not even one carload and Spike was moved out of his crypt again. A less dramatic exit this time, but a more permanent one, he hoped.

And later that night, when the Summers were all tucked tight in the dark, he sat on his freshly made, newly acquired bed, soothed his wakeful little girl with his hands, and told her all about it.


	17. Chapter 17

Spike spent his first full day at the Summers residence running smack into that contrast between demanding and being given. What he'd have stolen from Xander right in front of him, Joyce offered, and he found himself muttering his gratitude. Washcloth and towels of his own. A lamp and other discarded oddments to furnish the basement with. A mug of warmed blood sitting in an empty place at the table.

After dinner, Joyce clattered dishes into the dishwasher and spoke of inconsequential gallery happenings while he planted himself on the kitchen island with his feet dangling, half his attention on her and half on the stirrings in his stomach.

"So, do you have a preference?"

"What?" He glanced up, caught.

"About chores," Joyce said.

"No...?"

"The girls would probably tell me it's not fair, letting you choose, but I can't help feeling that you _are_ a guest, in a way. So dishes, laundry, bathrooms, or floors? Except you shouldn't do anything strenuous, so that leaves out the floors."

"I shouldn't?"

She glanced over her shoulder at him. "Because you're pregnant. You have to be gentle with yourself for a while."

"Does that mean I have to be gentle, too?" Buffy said, walking in and brandishing a banana from the fruit bowl. "Pre-patrol snack."

"I, uh, don't think it works that way with me," Spike said, thinking of futons and car accidents and armageddons. "Still a vampire. It's just I'm... occupied, now."

Joyce snorted. "I'm sure even vampires get backaches."

"Well..."

"Laundry, I think," Joyce said. "After all, you're in the basement anyway."

"Better not," he said. "Washing machines and I, we're nemeses, you might say."

"What, does Evil not do laundry?" Buffy asked. " 'Cause if you say yes, then I feel a dark-Buffy phase coming on."

"As long as Evil lives in my house, Evil will do his share like everyone else," Joyce said. "Laundry."

"Thought you said I got to choose?" Spike protested.

"Yes," she nodded in agreement, "except that I can never get anyone else to do it, and meanwhile you'll be alleviating that horrible guilt you feel for imposing on us rent-free until the baby is born and you find work."

"You're confused," Buffy said around a mouthful of banana. "_Angel's_ the one with all the soulful guilt."

But Joyce was giving him that maternal you'll-say-yes-if-you-know-what's-good-for-you look that hadn't changed all that much in a hundred and fifty years, and he said hurriedly, "Right. Ashamed of myself. Laundry it is. But," he added, "the wash is apt to come out shrunk, just to spite me."

"Do you need me to slay the no-good very bad washing machine?" Buffy asked, brows drawn and threatening.

Joyce rolled her eyes -- well, at least Spike knew where the girls got it from, now. "I will show you the magic buttons to push," she told him, "and then I will write the sacred ritual down so that you can't forget."

Buffy nabbed another banana from the bowl. "Off to patrol. You can't come," she added to Spike. "You're pregnant."

He glared sourly, and she strolled out the kitchen door with a smirk.

Laundry, then. He added it to the running mental list of things he must or must not do, living with people again -- in a permanent, settled sort of sense, not in a 'chained in the bathtub, tied to the sleeping chair' sense. He was to take his boots off in the house and walk softly after bedtime. Rinse his mugs after he'd used them. No punching the walls when Buffy twitted him once too often -- the upstairs walls, anyway; in the basement they were concrete, and he doubted anyone would mind if he bashed his knuckles on them now and again.

Once upon a time, he'd taunted Angel with being housebroken. But Angel never had it this bad.

But then -- he glanced at Joyce's cheeks flushed over the hot water, at Dawn with her head bowed in a book -- Angel never had it this good, either.

~*~*~

He was sitting on the back porch working on the latest of long line of cigarettes when Buffy got back. "Need a word with you," he said.

"Yeah?" She rubbed at a shiny spot on her jacket and then hissed. "Yucky icky _acidy_ demon," she said.

"I need blood."

"Ew. Wait, let me guess, you're a vampire!"

Chip. Slayer's mum. Dawn. Not being staked. "The human blood, Slayer."

Her head snapped up. "We're not draining some innocent victim for you, Spike."

"She's too small, the doc said. Suppose she's born a runt? Or she doesn't grow up properly, because she wasn't fed right?" His voice had turned raspier than he'd meant. "Or could be she's already buggered -- been living in me all this time without any tending, after all. Guess it won't matter that she's born a mini-Slayer, if she can't walk like she should or her head's a little wonky."

"Spike..." Buffy was eyeing him more uncertainly now.

"_Every day_, Slayer, she's missing a bit more of what she needs, and if I can't make up for the first six months, I will bloody well not let her go suffering for the other three." He slid his tongue across dry lips. "Don't even know why I bothered asking. All you're worried about is me enjoying the stuff.

"Won't you?" She gave him the trademarked brow of Slayer skepticism.

"Well, _yeah_." It'd be an an actual supply, more than just the blue-moon evening when he could afford a pint. He could already taste it, the ghost of breakfast future pricking at his tongue and his throat, promising rich sweet bliss, and if it took that mysterious modern convenience the microwave to bring it to its proper 98.6, who was he to complain?

And there was Buffy still standing in front of him, lips pursed.

Conversation. Right.

"Not the point. If it was just some human bint who needed a transfusion for her little one's health, you'd see she got it, wouldn't you? And none of this shocked disapproval, either." He snorted. "I'll figure it out, with or without you. Willy's, or the hospital, or something."

After a moment, she said, "When did _you_ get to be all logic-vamp?"

"That a trick question?"

She ignored him. "You're right," she said, more softly. "I'll get the gang together tomorrow and we'll see what we can do."

"What? No! This is between you and me, Slayer. I'm not parading my private concerns to the whole neighborhood."

"You are if you want us to help you," she said, smiling ever so slightly.

Damn her smiles. "I'm not a sodding group project!"

A snort and an irreverent pat on the shoulder as she climbed the stairs. "You are now."

~*~*~

Tara hadn't been sure she should come. She'd told Spike the truth when she said she didn't like confrontations -- she always ended up hot and flushed, looking anywhere but where she needed to, and the stammer got even worse than usual. Besides, she was the last person to ask about illicit human blood supplies. But Willow had told Buffy they'd come before even mentioned it to Tara, and that assumed inclusion was precious.

Also, Tara wondered if Spike might need to see a friendly face.

When they arrived at the Summers' that evening, Spike was sprawling out of a stuffed chair, flaunting his belly, with his eyes half-lidded and his hands folded over his chest. Strategy, Tara thought, and was convinced when she noticed how his gaze flitted up and back again as they entered. Bluff. Play like you have all the cards, and maybe you won't need them. Act like a predator and they won't notice you're prey -- which was why what looked like stillness was really tension, waiting to snap.

Tara squinted to clear her head and looked for someplace to sit.

Xander was hunched in one corner of a couch, the farthest seat in the room from Spike. Anya, cuddled at Xander's side, caught Tara's gaze and patted the space next to her vigorously. In a tone clearly meant to be a whisper, she said, "I know where the bathroom is."

"That's good," Tara said, sitting. "I-in case--"

"In case they yell at each other like that other time, and we have to go hide again," Anya cut in. "I brought my nail kit, since painting each other's nails is a traditional bonding activity."

Willow squeezed in at Tara's other side, flushing and with a hint of a scowl. Spike, when Tara stole a glance, looked ever so faintly amused.

Buffy wandered in, surveyed the group, and wandered out again.

"Are w-we waiting for Mr. Giles?" Tara asked.

"Riley," Xander answered.

"But it's not a Scooby meeting without Giles," said Willow.

"Thank God for that," muttered Spike, closing his eyes and thus not seeing the Willow-frown and the Xander-frown.

A firm knock came at the door. Buffy scrambled across the hallway and out the door, pulling it shut behind her.

"Has to snog the boy," said Spike. "Make sure he behaves."

"Gee, does that work with you?" Xander said.

Spike's smirk was immediate and assured. "Care to find out?"

Xander's teeth snapped shut with an audible click, and he shifted resolutely away.

Buffy strode in, Riley behind her. She pulled the coffee table away from the couch and sat on it; he leaned against a wall. "So, plans to get Spike human blood," she said.

"Explain why we want to, again?" Xander said.

Spike opened his mouth and Buffy shot him a glance. "It's for the baby," she said, eyebrow lifted. Xander's gaze fell to the floor. "Look," she said, surveying the faces. "This isn't about Spike, okay? We don't have to like Spike." A throat-clearing from Riley's corner. "We don't have to care about Spike at all. But the baby is human, and this is not her fault. If she needs help, we have to help. Right?"

After a pause for the individual murmurs of agreement, Buffy said, "So where can we get blood from?"

"The blood bank has blood," Anya offered.

"But people _need_ that blood," Willow said. "We can't just take it."

"Sure you can," Spike said. "When people in this town die from lack of blood, it's not because a few bags went missing from the community stash."

Xander said, "People donated that to help other people, not to give you a, a blood happy."

_Blood happy?_ mouthed Willow.

Spike rolled his eyes. "It's not like they're using it anymore. Besides," he added in a tone half-defiant, half-pleading, "_she's_ a person, isn't she?" The mask was dropped, the bluff forgotten.

"We're not just talking about a couple of bags, are we?" Buffy asked. "We're talking about two and a half months of Spike supper. I don't think Sunnydale General can afford to lose that much."

"You're really talking about stealing from a hospital?" Willow said. "Isn't that kind of villain-y behavior? I mean, not Darth Vader villain-y--"

"More the Han Solo type," Xander said.

"But Han Solo is cool!" Willow protested. "Aside," she said, brow furrowing, "from the smuggling and the not paying his debts and the shooting the debt collector--"

"Because he totally shot first," Xander added.

"Uh _huh_," Buffy said firmly. "So, other suggestions?"

"Not to be all sacrificial lambey," said Willow, "but we have blood, too."

Spike gave her a sudden, startled glance and sat forward, elbows on knees.

"_No_ way," said Xander. "My blood, my veins. It's a very close relationship."

"For the baby," Willow repeated softly, and Xander flicked a glance to Spike and was silent.

"Doesn't matter," Spike said -- regretfully, it sounded to Tara. "You lot wouldn't be enough, not long-term. You'd go all anemic."

"What do you care?" Riley, speaking from his corner for the first time.

"It doesn't do me any good if my supply dries up, does it?" The glare he directed at Riley suggested that he would not, on the other hand, much mind if _Riley's_ blood supply evaporated entirely. "Look, it's simple, all right? Not cheap, but simple. A couple of pints a day from Willy's--"

"But trafficking in human tissues is illegal!" Willow said. He gave her a sidelong glance. "O-okay, not the main point."

Buffy added, "But you said Willy, what, keeps people chained up and fed so he can use them for blood-cows?"

"No, I said Willy's _supplier_ doesn't _kill_ the people the blood comes from. The chains are all yours."

"So they're not enslaved and helpless."

"What the bloody hell do I care?"

"Right." She blinked several blinks of intense concentration. "You don't care. How did I ever think this could work?"

"Slayer?"

She threw her hands up. "Of course the soulless murdering guy doesn't care if people get turned into Bessies. They're just, what, Happy Meals on legs?"

"Well, _yeah_." He huffed at her. "You think just because I'm expecting, I'm all fluffy now? Overflowing with sunshine and self-righteousness?"

"No. I don't think that. That would be _stupid_ of me to think that." She glared at him.

"Fine!" He pushed himself to his feet and faced her down. "You won't kill and I can't, you won't abide filching a few stray bags from the hospital or supporting a little free enterprise, and heaven forbid you should sacrifice a bit of your own for the cause. Well, never mind. Just don't ask me how I go about providing for my little girl if you don't want me sullying your conscience."

Through gritted teeth, she said, "We are _trying_ to _help_."

"Think I've had about enough help from you," he growled.

"Says the vampire living in my house!"

Maybe it was that Anya was pinching Tara's arm and nodding her head towards the hallway, or that, as usual, people yelling made Tara want to fold into a shadow and disappear before the ire turned on her. Or maybe it was Spike's furious, desperate frustration washing through her like a shock wave, his fists clenched and every facial muscle rigid.

Regardless, from somewhere, an idea came.

"W-where did you say Willy gets the blood from?" she said.

Thrown off his rhythm, Spike turned to her curiously. "His supplier," Spike said. "Some bloke up in the great metropolis -- deals in all the biologicals. Eyeballs and spinal fluid and so on. Shipment comes in every two weeks."

"Could we steal it?" Tara said.

"Ooh," Willow said. "We could intercept one of those shipments. It'd be like Robin Hood -- rob the rich to feed... Spike? Or maybe not so much. But we wouldn't be supporting the evil black marketers--"

"--and we'd put a crimp in the local blood trade, which would be one point to the good," Buffy finished.

"Could be workable," Spike said, considering. "Got some nasty brutes for security, not to mention the vamps hanging around Willy's who'll want to get in on the action, but I expect you and All American over there would enjoy the fisticuffs."

That first breakthrough made, all the other planning came easier. On delivery night, Buffy and Riley would attack the security guards and hopefully take the driver out in the process while Xander grabbed the crates of blood.

"Crates?" Xander repeated in appalled disbelief. "They sell blood by the crate now?"

Meanwhile, Willow and Tara would play lookouts and direct any mystical influences they could. "Our first mission together," Willow whispered, her eyes shining. Tara smiled back, trying to hold the apprehension in.

"And I'll stay here and mind the embroidery," Spike finished sourly, but his gaze was on his hand, absently stroking his stomach, and he looked only mildly disgruntled. Willow reached over and squeezed his arm.

Anya declared that she was bored, and she and Xander left soon after, he with an apologetic shrug to them all and a furtive touch to Spike's shoulder -- which was maybe also an apology.

Willow eyed Buffy and Riley, muttering in a corner, and stood. As Tara rose to follow her, Spike caught her arm. "Think you did the trick," he said.

"I d-didn't really do anything. It was just an idea."

"Yeah, but it had that flavor of justice and good deeds about it. All it took, I guess." He shrugged. "It's that sodding human logic."

If he saw her flinch, he didn't make any mention of it. Leaning closer in, he said softly, "You know, interfering with the black market's no straightforward enterprise. As easy to harm as heal." He dropped back and waited, his expression a challenge: What'll you do with that, White Witch?

She knew he was expecting her to balk. He'd have been better off not saying anything, but for at least one instant he must have cared more about testing her ethics than about whatever trouble it'd cause him.

Maybe it was that gift -- some called it other things -- that allowed her glimpses, clear as spring water, of others' hearts. Or maybe -- she pushed the certainty down deep in her chest -- it was that part of her logic that _wasn't_ human. She simply didn't have it in her to worry about the hypothetical concerns of abstract people while the need of the person in front of her shone so vivid.

She knelt, his eyes never leaving her. Cautiously, remembering his skittishness last time, she laid one hand gently against his stomach. Marveled: life, growing out of death. "Some things _are_ straightforward," she said.


	18. Chapter 18

The liberation of ill-gotten blood was doubtless a thrilling venture for certain people that weren't Spike. Buffy and Riley, for example, who were this very minute likely beating the sticky cerulean snot out of those Greknol security demons. Or the witches, getting their mojo on and riding the adrenaline -- it'd be a lively night at Tara's afterwards, he'd wager. Even Xander was lugging whole cases of blood about, which sounded downright tolerable as menial labor went.

Spike, on the other hand, sat straddling a dining chair in the Summers kitchen watching Dawn make something she claimed were mini-pizzas. He was skeptical; in his wide and varied travels he'd never met a pizza that involved peanut butter.

"This is how Ted made them," she explained, slicing the pickle to put on top.

"That is _not_ how Ted made them," Joyce said, taking a Tupperware container from the back of the fridge and peering suspiciously inside. She handed it to Spike, who held his breath and tossed it into the sink. "Ted's were... very good, actually."

"That was just because of the special Stepford dust."

Joyce pushed aside the last, nearly-empty canister of pigs' blood and Spike held his hand out. "I'll take that."

She handed it to him and said, "The Stepford dust had nothing to do with the fact that there were no pickles on his mini-pizzas."

"Ted?" said Spike.

"A man I dated for a while," Joyce said. "It ended badly."

"He was a robot who tried to kidnap her and lock her up in his scary time capsule basement," Dawn explained.

"Ah ha," Spike said, waiting for a correction from Joyce -- but she was nodding in chagrined agreement.

"But he was a really good cook," Dawn added. "And he gave me the first Harry Potter book, which is, like, my favorite series ever now."

Faintly, a horn beep from the front of the house. "Janice!" Dawn balled up her creation in a paper towel. "You sure you'll be okay, Spike?"

"Terrifying though she is, I think I can handle one evening alone with your mum," Spike said. "Scram."

While Joyce followed Dawn out into the hallway to see her off, Spike warmed the very last of the pigs' blood. He'd meant to wait until the Buffy team got back with the good stuff, but there was no way he was lasting that long. "S'no wonder I'm starting to look like a mare in foal," he told his girl. "Bloody demanding appetite you've got." The steady Summers-funded supply was helping, though not as much as he'd expected. He could take a quart and a half at once -- and had, a couple of times, just to see -- and even with his back teeth floating, hollowness gnawed faintly at him.

Just how much had the Initiative screwed with him? Was it the pigs' blood diet fouling him up, or his own mishandled innards? Until Stacey's nutritional advice, he'd never expected a chance to find out. It was another reason to keep glancing at the wall clock, waiting for Buffy and co. to bust in that door with their precious load.

"Well," said Joyce as she walked back in the kitchen, "seeing as that was Janice's mother driving the car, and since Dawn's favorite reason for sneaking out and lying about where she's going is sitting in my kitchen--" She gave Spike a pointed glance. "--maybe she will actually be at Janice's house when I call in an hour to check."

"Don't think she meant to worry you."

"Oh, she just didn't _think_." Joyce shook her head. "Consider this your insider's preview of raising a teenager."

The words took a moment to sink in. "Bloody hell," he said softly.

She must have read the bewilderment in his eyes. "They do grow up, you know."

In those six words lurked a horde of anxieties waiting to ambush, and with a deep breath and a long-familiar trick of mental detour, Spike left them there to wait. He could do them battle later, when such fraught disciplines as diaper-changing and bath-giving were mastered.

"Why did you ask me here?" he said suddenly. "Not saying I'm not grateful--" which was really the closest he'd come to saying thank you "--but what do you want with a vampire and a little one that's not yours?"

"Now you ask?" she said, lips curved in amusement.

"Didn't really dare, until I got moved in. Didn't want you rescinding the offer."

She huffed a laugh to the fridge door. "Buffy told me about you, about how much you wanted to keep the baby, and the way you were living in that crypt -- cold and dirty and damp. I just couldn't stand to think of a child living like that, no matter how much she was loved." She turned and laid a hand on his arm. "_Any_ child."

"Oh," he said blankly. He'd supposed it was something like that, and not long ago he'd have been amused by the frail human compassion. Now he couldn't find anything funny about it.

"Besides, this way I get a grandbaby, almost, without worrying about either of _my_ babies having sex -- no, don't disillusion me," she said, a hand raised against his half-formed correction. "Unless it's Dawn," she added sharply. Then, with a smirk bordering on impish, she said, "I have to say, though, of all Buffy's friends that I worried might turn up pregnant one day, _you_ weren't even on the list."

"Glad to hear it."

~*~*~

Dawn got back just after ten, and once Joyce had gone to bed Dawn and Spike settled on the sofa and channel surfed in comfortable darkness lit only by the screen. Eventually, Spike convinced Dawn -- or possibly Dawn convinced Spike; the flow of the argument was a bit nonlinear -- that _My Fair Lady_ was the best thing on. Spike scoffed at Audrey Hepburn's impression of a London gutter accent, disowned Dawn for saying the 'romance stuff' was boring -- "You can't disown me! You're already dead!" -- and simply played deaf to her insistence that he liked the singing parts best.

Henry Higgins was having a semi-musical epiphany about becoming accustomed to things and Dawn was snoring lightly on Spike's arm when he heard steps coming up the walk. Spike eased away from her, swung the front door open, and stuck his head out over the threshold. "Slayer?"

"Spike." Buffy thrust a crate into his hands. Blood. He could smell it wafting out from the wrapping... not to mention the damp spot on the one corner. He set it down just inside the door. Riley strode up the porch steps, boots thumping in the dark, and Spike stepped aside for him and then followed Buffy back out to... Riley's jeep? He thought Xander had picked her up.

"Everything as planned?" he asked.

She handed him a third crate. "They chewed on Xander some. Another guard, we didn't see him until..."

"Until he jumped the boy," Spike finished.

"Yeah." She pulled the last crate out of the back seat and slammed the door shut.

"But he'll pull through." Life as a Summers houseguest would be suddenly much more difficult, otherwise.

"It wasn't end-of-the-Xander type woundage. It was just... more damage than I ever thought he'd have to take for _you_."

"Oh," he said blankly. His habitual Xander-contempt seemed have failed him, leaving him with nothing to say.

He and Buffy caught up to Riley on the sidewalk. After one threatening grimace from Riley, Spike slipped past while they were busy giving sloppy goodbyes. He found Dawn in the kitchen, emptying the first crate into the now-mostly-cleared fridge. About one and a half would fit there, he thought, and another half in his mini-fridge in the basement; the others would go next door, where the Florences had said they'd be delighted to house Dawn's biology project in their extra outdoor freezer/fridge.

"So this is it, huh?" Dawn said when he came back up from the basement. "The real thing. The jalapeño ice cream."

"That it is."

"Where do you think it came from?"

The blood was in pouches like hospital bags, and he wondered if they'd just taken Anya's blood bank suggestion via an indirect route. He picked one up, inspected it, let his nostrils flare over what trace of scent had escaped the vinyl. "People, I expect. One way or the other."

"Yeesh, thanks for the news flash." She closed the fridge door and turned to him, blue eyes wide and watchful. "So you're going to drink that, right?"

He knifed the pouch open and poured it into one of the mugs designated his after Buffy had refused to drink after him no matter how many times the mugs had gone through the dishwasher. Even cold, the smell of the stuff set his throat tingling as no perfectly heated pigs' blood ever did. He watched impatiently as the mug spun round and round in the microwave, fighting the fangs just itching to drop. He could feel Dawn's gaze boring into his shoulder blade.

The microwave beeped shrilly and he pulled the blood out. It was too much, that scent like condensed ecstasy promising him eternity and untold power and bliss. He lifted the mug, leaned back, and gulped long breathless mouthfuls, warming and electrifying. Too soon it was gone, and only then, as he maneuvered around his fangs to lick at the rim, did he realize he'd shifted faces.

"So?" said Buffy from behind him.

He shook the fangs away and turned around to face her, standing next to Dawn. "It'll do," he said, trying to hold his voice steady.

"I'm sure Xander will be glad to hear that."

He huffed. "Look, line of fire, wasn't it? For an innocent in need of assistance. What're you sniping at me for?"

A deep breath, lips pressed thin; then she let the breath go and nodded, looking somewhere that wasn't him. "I know. I just... This better be worth it."

"_She's_ worth it," he said softly, as though he'd had any thought of her at all a moment ago while he swallowed that life's nectar down.

"Yeah." Another long breath. "Yeah, I know."

Dawn's voice broke through that solemn instant of silence. "This is like the first human blood you've had in a long time, right?"

Spike broke his gaze from Buffy to glance at Dawn, who was frowning hard at the flattened pouch. Blood pooled in pockets near the seams and a single drop had splashed onto the counter. "Like I told the doc, there's been a little now and then."

She gave a one-shoulder shrug. "So who was the last person you ate?"

"Dawn!" snapped Buffy, pinning Spike with a don't-you-dare glance.

Which was not, perhaps, the best way to keep him quiet. "Was a man," he said.

Dawn's gaze was intent on her finger, dipping into the spilt blood. "Yeah?"

Buffy glared, nostrils flaring, but she didn't move in for a jab to the nose and he took that for permission. "I'd just come off a royal three-week pisser of a binge, after losing that sodding sunshine ring." And wouldn't he love to have that back now, a trinket that could share his little girl's daylight with him. "I figured on coming back to Sunnydale and giving a few certain folks a good killing."

A glance to Buffy, but she just looked back, unfazed. After all, it wasn't as though this was news to her.

"I was in a hurry, hell bent to get here and give my grand speech and get myself zapped with glorified cattle prods. I didn't want to bother hunting when I got into town, so I thought I'd grab a snack on the road."

Dawn was listening. Oh, was she listening -- with her ears and her hunched shoulders and her eyes that didn't look his way.

"There was a bloke walking along the highway. Holes patched in his jeans with even the patches wearing through. Bedroll on his back. Full beard, blotchy gray like he'd drizzled old motor oil through it.

"And he stunk."

That caught Dawn finally. She fixed him with a flat, relentless gaze, and he wished she hadn't. He'd wished a lot of things to do with this story, back when he'd first begun to grasp what reduced toothless predator he'd become. He wished his last kill had had some glory to it, someone pretty or who'd led him a good chase or who'd put up their fists and made him work for that triumphant moment of fangs in flesh. Or sometimes he wished that it'd been someone he'd taken while he was still beyond pissed, a lost memory that he could tell to himself any way he liked.

But now, Dawn's stark blue looking back at him, he just wished he could mumble something about not remembering and have had it be the truth.

"So," he said, "I pulled over and I pushed the passenger door open, and soon's he leaned in I grabbed him and broke his neck and shoved him back out. Because he was all sour, like I said, sweat and auto fumes mixed in with the sweat. Didn't want him smelling up the car.

"His blood was sweet as any, though. Went 'round and drained him, and left him all comfortable, snuggled in the ditch. The end."

"Oh," Dawn said. A long moment passed of him just waiting, feeling bone-deep for those human pulses he could almost hear, nestled behind the girls' twin heartbeats. Then Dawn dropped her crossed arms. "I'm going to bed." Eyeing him carefully with her lips pressed white, she walked past him and out.

He hunched over the kitchen island, elbows to the countertop, and bowed his head.

"Why would you tell her that?" Buffy asked, voice sharp and bewildered. "I thought you were playing some creepy older brother thing for her. She'll probably have nightmares now."

"She already has nightmares." Also thanks to him. "Thought you'd approve, really. Wouldn't want your sis to get the idea vampires are fluffy little house pets."

"She's just thirteen!"

He lifted his head to look at her. "So now I'm in trouble for being honest with a minor, is that it?"

They looked each other in the eye, she still suspicious, he tired and aching a little bit with a sort of aimless regret. Mostly he was just tired. He supposed that answered his question about the effects of diet versus experimental internal meddling; usually after that much human blood he'd be burning for a shag or a scrap or both. Now all he wanted was to sprawl across his rescued futon and close his eyes.

Buffy frowned at him for a moment more and then shook her head. "Um, listen. While we were out tonight, I staked this random vamp who was wandering around asking for a vampire 'in appearance male, but ripe with child.'" She made a face.

"Bugger," Spike said wearily.

"You know who I'm talking about, I'm guessing."

"Vamp cult. Looking to kill me and the little one both, seeing as we're such an offense to undead family values." A pause, while he considered the relative merits and risks of his next words. "They're what got after me and Dawn a few months ago."

"Oh. _Oh_." A soft huff, and then the beginnings of a predatory grin. "Well, won't it be exciting when they come looking for you in _my_ town? They'll see what happens to vamps who snack on the Slayer's sister. Do they know you're here, or were they guessing? Maybe I should send out flyers."

"Slayer!"

She paused mid-gesture. "What?"

"I'm not putting me and my girl out as bait just so you can get your revenge on."

"Oh," she said, giving his stomach a hard glance. It was an expression worn a lot around him lately: that puzzled irritation usually reserved for impossible solutions to otherwise simple equations. Buffy sighed. "Okay. Yeah. I mean, if it were just you..."

"Very funny." Except if it were just him, he'd probably have been willing to play; good hearty brawls were too few anymore.

"Okay, so, I see 'em, I stake 'em, but if they find you and I'm not around..."

"What do you suggest, then?"

She squared her shoulders and said, "I think it'd probably be good if you just stuck around the house. Unless there's someone to go with you, I mean."

"Bugger that. I'm not twiddling my thumbs on house arrest for the next _two months_."

"What, do you think I _want_ you breathing chilly air down my neck every time I turn around? Believe me, I don't. But that's not the point, is it?" She crossed her arms and looked up, every angle in her stance a challenge.

"I can take care of myself! And her. Both of us."

A flash of motion, and then her knuckles were pressing into his belly. He stumbled back and she caught his arm, steadying him. "One punch," she said. "One good stab in the wrong place."

The vision of it came over him like a convulsion: a gleaming blade tearing into him, slicing through soft bone and fragile skin sheer as vellum. Blood, hers and his, spilling out and staining the pavement. Finally just him alone, his belly and arms both as empty as though she'd never been.

Fighting the tremble in his hands, he took a moment to assure himself of that precious flutter. With a shuddering breath he opened his eyes. Hoarsely, "All right."

"Okay," Buffy said.

A moment, while the residual terror ebbed. Then, "I'm not much for sitting still."

She groaned. "I know. Do you think we can get this baby born without one of us going insane?"

He managed a thin smirk. "Well, I've always said there were a few bats flitting around _your_ belfry."

Two months. He felt inclined to a groan or two himself. It'd be two months of nothing but these few walls to stare at and no one but Summers and Scoobies for company -- not that he'd seen much of any other kind lately.

Laughable deadly vamp cultists with too much time on their hands. Two months indoors, except when he could cajole and/or browbeat someone to accompany him. Dawn, peering intently at him with that white bleakness.

And the best he could do about any of it was nothing.


	19. Chapter 19

"He's evil!" Buffy said.

"Not really seeing the news in that flash," Willow said, eyes on her laptop, which she'd situated on Tara's artsy table/desk. As the images loaded she huffed at the screen, and Dawn, huddled at her shoulder, caught a glimpse of frills and maybe some lace. Eep.

Willow hit _Backspace_ and clicked on the next search result.

Behind them, Buffy shifted positions on the futon. "He leaves these piles of cigarette butts next to the porch, which I am so not touching. And forget laundry. When Mom asks, sure, but do you think Big Bad ever gets around to washing my underwear?" She frowned. "Not that I really want him touching my underwear."

"Uh, Buffy, are you sure that's vampire-evil?" Willow asked. "It kinda sounds more like man-evil. You know, like how they always leave their drippy towels on the floor in the bathroom? Not that I'd know anything about that anymore," she said, flashing a grin at Tara, who was peering over the other shoulder.

"He does that, too," Buffy said morosely, picking at the crocheted coverlet.

The next website wasn't any better: pink. Lots and lots of pink. _And_ ruffles. "Why is all this maternity stuff so _girly_?" Willow asked, grumbling.

Long pause.

"O-okay, forget I said that," she said.

"I can't believe you guys are buying Spike clothes," Buffy said.

" 'Cause clearly, he's totally capable of finding his own not dumpster-y, not-black clothes that maybe sort of fit him," Willow said. "Seriously, what he's got now? Kind of on the capybara side of ratty."

"And, oversized much?" Dawn added.

"W-wait, click down. There are some black ones." Tara pointed at the screen.

"Besides," Willow said to Buffy, "what's the point of having a pregnant guy around if you can't buy him maternity clothes?"

" 'Baby on Board'?" Dawn read skeptically. "Spike would totally never wear that. Anyway, they're all girl-shaped. His shoulders won't fit."

"Maybe we should just get him some plain t-shirts," Tara said.

"That's no fun," Dawn said.

"Ooh, but hey!" said Willow. "There could be screen printing."

A long, admiring pause. In stereo chorus, "Ooooh."

"What should we put on them?" Dawn said.

"Bet we can think of something."

"Guys, I'm serious," Buffy said. "I turn around, and Spike is _always there_. He takes up the whole couch, and he always gets there first, since it's not like he ever leaves the house."

"Mom likes him," Dawn said.

"Yeah, and that's another thing," Buffy said. "Sometimes I come in from patrol and he's in the kitchen, and I swear he is _charming_ my _mother_."

"Is it really that bad?" Willow asked, brows peaked in sympathy. "You could maybe ask Xander or Giles to put him up for a few days."

"Are you kidding? Mom would kill me for turning him out." Buffy blew her cheeks out. "Anyway, he's not around _all_ the time," she added grudgingly. "He's been sleeping us out of house and home lately."

"Yeah, what kind of stupid vampire goes to bed at midnight?" Dawn said.

"Do you think he's depressed?" Willow said. "Sleeping a lot is a sign of depression."

"Spike _depressed_?" Buffy said. "Sappy and maudlin Spike, I've seen; fuming Spike, yeah. But depressed Spike?"

"I've seen depressed Spike," Willow said. "But he, uh, he wasn't asleep."

"He says he's bored, and we talk too much," said Dawn. Not that she'd really wanted to talk to him all that much since his story about eating the hitchhiker. She watched TV with him sometimes, but that mostly just involved making fun of whatever was on the screen. Even then she felt his eyes on her now and then, and she had to pretend she didn't notice until he quit looking.

He was waiting for a sign that they were still friends. Sitting on the couch with him ought to have been proof that they were, except of course it wasn't, and she still hadn't figured out what to say about that, or if she even wanted to say anything.

And she had no idea where helping get him clothes fit in. It was just that he needed them and she wanted to help, even if she never spoke to him again.

"He's a vampire of many moods, I'll give him that," said Buffy.

"A little mood-swingy?" asked Willow.

"He's an entire playground of swings. Are you _sure_ this isn't related to the baby-having?"

"Physically?" asked Willow. "Pretty sure. I think that might just be Spike."

Buffy moaned.

"But he kind of has a lot of pressure on him right now. Maybe he's a little stressed out?"

"Pressure?" Buffy exclaimed. "He's sleeping in my basement and heating blood out of my refrigerator in my microwave. Then he lies on my couch and watches stupid soap operas on my TV. How is _he_ stressed?"

"W-wouldn't you be?" said Tara. She'd been so quiet for so long Dawn had almost forgotten she was there. "I mean, if you had to depend on other people for food and a place to live and everything?"

"And if you couldn't leave the yard?" said Dawn despite herself. Just because she didn't know how she felt about him didn't mean she didn't know what _he_ was feeling. He spent way too much time on the back porch, cigarette between his fingers and his head tilted a little, like he was trying to hear all the places he couldn't go.

"Plus there's the having a baby part," Willow added. "Kinda scary, even for the scary guy."

"I know." Buffy heaved a sigh. "See, this is why pregnant vampire as housemate equals bad."

"Yes, Buffy," said Willow. "That's the object lesson of this story: never help a vampire in need."

"Hey, don't knock it," Buffy said. "Pretty sure that's a maxim in the Slayer Handbook." Stretching, she rose and peered at the screen of Willow's laptop. "Ooh, time to go. I have to change for the Riley-date tonight. Can you make sure Dawn gets home?"

"Sure," Willow said. "One safe and speedy Dawn delivery, as soon as we're done."

"And, uh, don't go too crazy with the clothes," Buffy said. "After Spike gets them, _I_ still have to live with him."

Once she was gone, the girls talked t-shirt slogans. Willow pleaded for just one pink t-shirt mixed in with the black, and finally Tara, lip quirked, shook her head and joined the consensus. "I don't think he'll wear it," she said.

"Not the point," Willow said. "The point is the look on his face when he sees it."

Designs chosen and money pooled, Willow made noises about walking Dawn home.

"Actually, can I, um, talk to you?" asked Dawn, glancing uncertainly at Tara. She liked Tara, and Spike seemed to like her, too, which meant she must be okay. But she didn't really _know_ her yet, and...

"Oh!" Tara said, catching her look. "I have to do some research for that biography in literature class. Find me at the library w-when you're ready?" Pulling together a pile of papers, she shuffled out the door, knapsack over her shoulder.

"What's up, Dawnie?" asked Willow.

Deep breath. "I need to know about a dead guy," she said.

"Ooh, like maybe a job for Slayer and co?" Willow's grin turned down. "Buffy'd be mad if I let you help research Scooby stuff."

"It's not Scooby stuff. I mean, he died a long time ago. I just want to know who he was. Like, his name and stuff."

She wondered if she should have thought of a reason -- not the real one, obviously -- for why she was asking, but Willow just shrugged. "Cool. Research girl, that's me! Whaddya know?"

Dawn gave her the details: the highway she figured Spike had taken back from L.A.; a guess at the date; the little she knew about the old stinky guy; and cause of death. Vampire.

"That might be kind of tough. I mean, hitchhiker dead by vampire? Have to be a lot of those out there."

"Try? Please?"

"Let's see. Newspapers, coroner's reports..." Willow tapped at the keyboard, clicking through login windows and password requests as smoothly as if she were magicking them open. Dawn wondered if those things went together, magic and hacking -- although she didn't think she was supposed to know that Willow was a hacker. Kind of like how she hadn't known for a long time after meeting Tara that she and Willow were, like, _together_.

At least when Spike killed someone, he told her about it.

"Hey, maybe this is your guy," Willow said. "Joseph Delaurent -- expired Washington state license, forty-three, cause of death was blood loss due to neck trauma. That's official-speak for vampire."

There was no way to be sure, Dawn realized. Willow was right; probably lots of graying hitchhikers had gotten eaten on route 101 that week. Maybe they even got their necks broken. She didn't know enough to tell hers -- Spike's -- from any of the others.

That made Joe as good as any, she supposed. "What else does it say about him? Can I see?"

Willow bit her lip, and then stood and gestured for Dawn to sit. When she'd settled into the red wicker chair, Willow said, "Just don't log out, or else I'll have to log back in. Oh, and don't, you know, change any of the fields, 'cause messing with official records is badness. Except when you have to, which sometimes I have to, because of the slaying and the demons, and--."

"I won't mess anything up!" Dawn adjusted the computer on her lap. "I just want to look."

"Right! Just looking." Willow strode resolutely across the room and then watched Dawn with her arms folded, lips pinched a bit with worry.

Whatever.

Joseph Delaurent: no known residence. Last employer Boeing, way up near Seattle, except that had been years ago. Only surviving relative was the sister in Tacoma who'd accepted the remains. Dawn wondered if she'd cried. When had she talked to her brother last? Why was he homeless, thumbing for rides from people that could be vampires, when he had family?

She didn't need coroner's pictures to tell her what the bite looked like in his neck -- it was about the same, she figured, as the one in her arm, all swollen around the torn, ragged holes the fangs made. Except maybe not swollen, since he was dead first. Anyway, she didn't need to see.

Instead she looked at the grainy, fuzzy image from the driver's license. He had a beard, but it wasn't as long as she'd pictured. He was grinning. His teeth were all jammed together in front and one of the eye teeth was stained yellow.

He was just a guy.

She wasn't sure what she'd hoped he'd be. There was a tiny bit of her that wanted him to be a child molester or someone who sold crack to kids, because then it'd be almost okay that he died. But that was stupid, because even if Joe deserved to die, she was sure lots of the people Spike had eaten didn't deserve it.

Another tiny bit wanted Joe to be a hero fireman with a limp from the blaze he nearly died from and two kids he really loved a whole lot and was trying to get back to, the night Spike had roared up in that trashy old car and eaten him. That would be awful. _Awful_. She could think about those kids missing their dad until her stomach hurt, and then she could go down to the basement and tell Spike just how miserable he'd made them. When he said he didn't care -- and he really wouldn't, she was pretty sure -- then she could get mad and tell him she hated him and stomp back upstairs, and then never talk to him again.

She kind of still wanted to do that. Joseph had been a person, and now he was dead.

It didn't really matter who he was. Knowing stuff about him didn't change anything; Dawn still didn't know what to say to Spike.


	20. Chapter 20

"Knives?" Spike said.

Dawn startled; she hadn't even known he was there until his voice had come just behind her shoulder. She turned around to see him holding the weapons out to her in offer. "Yep, that's what they are."

He let out a deep, aggravated sigh. "I thought I'd get in a little practice, seeing as I'm not much for short-range work anymore." He glanced down ruefully. "And I thought you might like a turn. I've got the target set up in the basement."

She grimaced. "Mom--"

"--said it was all right. I asked."

He watched her expectantly, waiting for... what? Approval? An all's-well signal?

"Fine," she said shortly. "Let's go."

Downstairs, she took a knife and warmed it in her palm, remembering the weight of it and how it had felt last time, which had been an awfully long time ago. Well, a month, anyway. She looked across the room to the depthless, shadowless outline of a man, drew back her elbow like Spike had taught her, and launched the knife.

She must have remembered okay; it struck the board point-first and stuck, though outside the target. "So is this supposed to be a peace offering, or something?"

Spike tossed his knife, which landed with a solid _thwack_ in the blank where a nose would have been. He squinted at it a moment before turning to her. "A what?"

She collected her knife. "You know, to make it okay that you kill people."

He looked at her, eyebrow lifted. "Does it?"

"No."

He shrugged. "Didn't figure it would."

"So..." She threw the knife.

Another shrug. "S'just, some violence takes the edge off sometimes. Say, when you're housebound and couldn't risk a proper scrap even if one offered."

She snorted. "What is that, like a vampire thing?"

Instead of throwing his knife, he slammed it onto his bed. Turning to her, he said, "Yeah, all right, it's a vampire thing. In fact, I'm a vampire. I kill people. I enjoy killing people, and I miss doing it.

"But, so happens I'm not doing it right now, am I?" His voice had pitched higher. "Instead of doing my bit for population control, I'm growing a human of my bloody own. I'm living in the Slayer's bloody basement, and, oh yeah, I'm standing here taking attitude from the Slayer's brat sister who can't make up her bloody mind whether or not she's speaking to me."

"Killing people isn't okay," she said. It was the only thread that she'd managed to hang onto out of the barrage.

"It's what I do," he said.

"Did."

A bitter snort. "Did," he agreed, picking up the knife again. Once past her, he stepped back, lifted, and let go, all in a graceful, fluid motion that left the knife sticking in the outline's face. "Well, bugger," he said, frowning.

"What's wrong?" Dawn asked. "You hit him."

"Yeah, I took out his chin. Brilliant." Before Dawn could move in and take her turn, he snatched the weapon from the wood, strode back across the room, and threw again. This time the knife buried itself smack between the collarbones.

He snorted and laid his hand against his stomach. "It's all your fault," he said, looking down. "Now you just nudge my center of gravity back to where it's bloody well supposed to be."

His gaze was soft, almost but not quite a smile, and it wasn't fair because Spike had _eaten_ people, lots of people, drained them dead, and someone who did that didn't get to be all sweet and cute afterwards. Not even Spike.

"I looked up that guy you talked about," she said.

"Yeah?" He glanced up, his expression melting from affectionate to uncertain in a half-second flat.

But now that she'd brought it up, what was there to say? "He was just some guy. Who died."

He'd turned blank, all softness gone as he fingered his t-shirt hem and watched her with those brittle blue eyes. "They tend to do that, round about the time I kill 'em."

"Do... do you _want_ me to hate you?" She could feel her voice starting to break.

"Want you to see how it is. Not gonna apologize for bein' a vamp. You don't like it, shove off."

"What about the baby?" said Dawn before she even thought.

His fidgety restlessness fell suddenly, silently away. "What about her?"

Now he'd see. "Maybe she won't _want_ a killer vampire dad."

The blankness shattered, leaving an expression so tight and full of angles it hurt to look at it. "Well, she won't have much choice, then, will she?" he said softly. "She's stuck with me. Not like there's much of a queue for the job."

"Spike..." This wasn't what Dawn had wanted, or maybe it was except she didn't anymore.

"There's just me, doing my miserable vamp best to keep her safe and feed her proper and make her feel like there's somebody in this whole bloody dimension who cares she's alive. Too bad if she bloody hates me, isn't it?"

His eyes narrowed on Dawn. "So there it is. Daft one-time vamp and would-be father. What's the verdict? Doomed to failure?"

I'm sorry, she wanted to say. I didn't mean it. "Well, why do you even care what I think if I'm just somebody's brat sister?" Because sometimes brat sisters were stupid and even mean bad vampires shouldn't listen to them.

He scowled at her, mouth working like he was chewing his answer instead of saying it. Finally he said, "Well, I don't, then." He blew his breath out, hard, and then he grabbed a packet of cigarettes from the combination crate/night table next to his bed and stalked up the stairs.

She stood there for a few moments, rigid, with tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. Eventually she picked up Spike's knife from the bed and hers from the target-board and started practicing again. Sometimes the handle instead of the tip banged into the wood, and once she missed the board all the way and winced at the dull _chink_ of the point hitting the cement wall. Spike was right, though. Throwing things did help. A little.

She should just go to bed. If she stayed in the basement too long, Spike would come back, unless he slept somewhere else instead. And see, now she knew just why she hadn't really talked to him for over a week.

But she'd really missed him.

Half an hour after Spike had gone, Dawn laid the knives on a shelf and went upstairs. She was pretty sure she knew where to find him, considering he couldn't go far from the house anymore. She tiptoed through the kitchen and peered out the window. There he was, hunched against the porch railing, a cigarette wisping in one hand and the other hand laid against the baby.

She took a sharp breath and twisted the doorknob.

By the time she stepped outside, he'd dropped his hand from his stomach. She blinked back the new ache in her eyes. He'd never minded about the baby before, not with her.

She sat down, tucking her skirt under her legs, and darted a glance at him. He was looking off into the shrubbery like he hadn't even heard her, which, duh.

Her nail polish was starting to chip. Maybe she could sneak some of that new red stuff Buffy'd just gotten. Although, even though red was totally an adult color, Dawn wasn't entirely sure it actually looked good on nails. It might be neater to ask Willow about that apple-green polish she put on her toenails sometimes. Willow was cool about sharing.

Spike grunted. When Dawn looked, he'd pressed his hand to his side and was rolling his shoulders. As soon as he caught her looking at him, he froze, watching her and doing that not-breathing trick.

Then he grimaced and pushed more firmly at his side. "Bloody..."

Alarm trumped everything. "Are you okay? Do you need...something? I can get Mom."

"M'all right." He snuck a quick glance at her, like trying to catch the headlines from someone else's newspaper. "Think she's got herself wedged up under my ribcage, is all."

Dawn thought about that and then wrapped her arms around herself. "I am never, ever having kids."

He looked over at her skeptically. "Thought you liked them, all 'cute and cuddly.'"

"Yeah, but you're having one, so I can just cuddle her instead."

"Oh, that's how it is, then?" A smirk simmered on his lips. "You just remember that the next time some git starts battin' his lashes at you."

"Geez, I didn't say I wasn't going to have sex."

"_Oh_?"

She wrinkled her nose at his scowl. "You know, someday. When I'm old. Haven't you ever heard of birth control?"

He cast a significant glance downward. "Clearly not."

She couldn't help the giggle that snuck out, but then he chuckled, too, and gave her a bit of one of his old grins before it melted away again to that wary blankness.

She missed him. A lot.

"I do hate you," she said softly. She kept her eyes off his face; she didn't want to watch it break. "I hate you, because..." Sniffle. _Crap_, why was she always crying in front of him? "Because you killed that guy and you don't even care, and you killed all those other people, too. Like... thousands of them?"

"Close enough," he said.

"And you don't care about them, either, and you're _evil_, just like everyone says, and..." She scowled with hot, stinging eyes out at the lawn. "And you're still my best friend."

Silence. That probably meant he thought best friending was stupid, and and how was it possible that she still cared what he thought? She squeezed her eyes shut against the tears and sniffed a couple of times, hard.

A touch pressed ever so lightly at her shoulder for a breath's length, and then lifted.

Finally, he said, "So I ousted the Janice bird, did I?"

She turned to see the hint of a grin lurking again. "You did what?"

"You and Janice. Thought you two were best mates."

"Janice..." It was hard to explain Janice. "You know how sometimes, your friends pick you? Janice is kind of like that. She was the first person who ever talked to me when I moved here, and we hang out a lot and stuff. But..."

"But sometimes you pick your friends," he said softly. "And... I'm it?"

"Yeah." She gave him a thin, watery smile. "Even when I hate you."

"Well." He looked off towards the rooftops and took a deep breath. "That's all right, then."

Dawn considered her nails again. Somewhere down the street, a garage door ground open.

"I'm sorry," she said. "What I said. About you and the baby? I didn't..." She wasn't sure how to finish.

"True, wasn't it?" He sucked a breath from his cigarette. "Vampire. Nothing to be done about it." He looked... not sad exactly. Resigned. It was in his slumped shoulders as much as his eyes or the downturn of his mouth.

"But you _like_ being a vampire."

"Mostly," he said. "But sometimes it's not the most convenient thing, is it?"

She didn't have an argument for that. She wished she did; sometime in the last hour all the cold, uncertain anger at her spine had melted and dripped away.

"Killing people isn't okay," she said again, as much to remind herself as him.

He stilled. "So I'm told."

"I wish you didn't." Somehow she needed to say it, obvious as it must have been by now. She needed the words spoken. "Before, I mean."

For a moment she didn't think he'd answer at all. Finally, carefully, he said, "I wish you didn't have such bloody awful taste in music."

Suddenly she was just tired, of Spike and thinking and trying to explain. "That's not the same," she said. Did he really, really not get it?

"It's all I've got." He gave her a sideways glance, looking as though he'd just stuck his foot out and was waiting to see if she'd stomp on his toes.

She'd just figured out that she didn't really want to stomp on his toes.

"I wish you'd hurry up and quit smoking," she said slowly, following a cue she wasn't sure she understood. "It's total yuck."

The corner of his mouth lifted, and she thought maybe she'd gotten it right. "You're too short," he said. Then, with a thoughtful frown, he added, "And too human."

"Well, you have cheesy hair."

"Do not!" He ran a hand over his bleach-fried head. "And anyway, you have the fashion sense of a pink-bowed Pekinese."

"So says Goth Boy."

His mouth gapped open, shut, open, shut, twice before he ground out, "I. Am _not_. Goth." He pinned her with a glare and held it so long she wondered if blinking was another one of those optional things for vamps. But the thought made her giggle, and after one more tightening of the eyebrows he sat back, shaking his head.

She stood. "I bet we could find something on TV, and you could tell me how stupid it is and how the old series was so much better."

He contemplated his cigarette a moment and then shoved himself to his feet. "Yeah, all right," he said, and if his expression had been on anyone less cool than him, she'd have called it a grin.


	21. Chapter 21

When he woke a half-hour after dark the house was quiet, but not deserted. He could hear the stirrings of at least one body moving upstairs. If Dawn were around he'd have expected her to come bother him by now, wanting knife practice or a TV partner or just to ask how he was feeling.

Like a coyote in a kennel -- _that_ was how he was feeling. Enough that he was muzzled; ten times worse not even having the space to stretch his legs.

And he was hungry, too. Again. So much for the lying in the dark and moping option.

He pushed himself upright. The nightlight Joyce had insisted on was more than enough to light a path through his humble domain: past the crib handed down to Joyce from someone she knew at the gallery; around by the fridge, stocked with blood as well as a bottle of stronger stuff set aside for the very first day he could drink it; past shelves shoved full of volleyballs and ice skates, photo albums and boxes of macaroni art and diaries lined with schoolgirl scrawl. He'd looked through it all already, some twice; the boredom of being chipped was nothing on the boredom of being chipped _and_ worried that anything he hit would hit back.

It'd be dazzling blackmail, some of it. He knew secrets now that'd freeze the Slayer in a fight, turn her flushing red or dark with rage or just white with long-buried sorrow.

Except it seemed he'd missed the window for that. Now the world would have to skew at least as far again as it'd already gone before he'd intentionally kill her.

He pulled on some sweatpants and stumped upstairs. Heated blood in hand, he wandered around the first floor and found no one. Up the second flight, his nose told him what he'd already guessed: only Buffy was home. For a moment he regarded her door -- open just a crack -- and then rapped his knuckles against it.

"Yeah?"

He pushed the door in.

"Spike." Buffy turned from the vanity to give him a neutral glance. "What?"

"S'your mum about?"

"Nope." She twisted to squint at a hair in the mirror. "She and Dawn have Dawnie night out tonight."

"Know when they'll be back?"

"No idea. They were talking about Barnes &amp; Noble and maybe a late movie or something. You know, Mom being the 'hip' parent."

And that was that.

He went back downstairs and shifted the sofa cushions until he could get comfortable -- a bigger challenge than it used to be -- and then channel surfed while sipping on his second mug of blood. A few minutes later Buffy trotted down wearing a shiny scrap of something and pants of plaid something else. She poked her head into the living room. "I'll be at Xander's if you, um, if you need me or anything."

"Right." He flipped through another two channels and lifted his mug in her general direction.

"It's poker night tonight," she said.

He snorted. "Won't that be a barrel of laughs. Bet not a one of you can bluff."

"Not really the point of poker night," she said.

He turned to look at her. "So what _is_ the point?"

She frowned at him a moment and then rolled her eyes, muttering, "Never mind," as she walked out the door.

The house took on the stillness that settled in a place empty of heartbeats -- except the one softly swishing in his belly. Against the quality of that silence the blare of the television fused into a solid brick of sound and dropped away. He let his thoughts drift dreamward, not pushing, only half-watching as they floated like leaves on a stream towards a small girl, two years old or maybe three, sitting sprawl-legged on a sidewalk with her back to him, and any moment now she'd hear his step and turn and he'd see her face...

"Spike?"

Startled awake, he turned to glare at Buffy, standing in the doorway. "What do you want?"

She returned the glare and shook her head. "Nothing." She stalked out.

He settled deeper into the sofa.

Then she was back, huffing a sigh. "You could come, if you wanted."

"Come." He squinted at her, trying to see through his sleep-fogged thoughts.

"To play poker. With us." She lifted an eyebrow towards the TV screen. "Unless your heart's set on buying that vowel."

For an instant he felt of a warm flash of... Well, whatever it was, he squashed it. "Right. Because I want to go marching down Main looking, well..." He gestured.

"I didn't think you cared about...that," she said. "How you look. Anyway, we don't take Main to Xander's, and at least you could get out of the house for a while."

"Slayer, you lot are all about thumping the evil, which I happen to be, you've got no taste in booze, music, fashion, or extracurricular activities, and every one of you's a good hundred and thirty years too young. There is no possible reason I'd want to waste my time hanging around with _you_."

Scowling, he punched at the remote.

"So..."

He turned back and she was still there, arms crossed and eyebrow quirked.

"So I'll take that as a yes?"

~*~*~

There was something to be said for new scenery, even if the Slayer did feature prominently in the foreground and it all led finally to Xander's basement door. His hands stuffed in the pockets of his meticulously buttoned duster, Spike followed Buffy in and halfway down the stairs before he saw Riley, a half-second before Riley looked up and saw him.

Spike growled in Buffy's ear, "You didn't say _he'd_ be here."

"He…" She turned to follow his line of sight. "Oh. Forgot," she mumbled back. "Sorry?" Which was entirely inadequate an apology, but still more than he'd expected to get -- and more than she'd expected to give, maybe, because she frowned and said, "My friends, my boyfriend. Deal."

"You brought Spike," said Xander from the couch. "Why did you bring Spike?"

"Because he..." She glanced behind to look at Spike as though _he_ had any clue for why the sudden altruism. "Mom and Dawn were gone, and he..." Was sitting on the couch minding his own business. "He was watching _Wheel of Fortune_," she finished, grimacing.

"I-is _Wheel of Fortune_ evil now?" asked Willow. "Is it brainwashy?"

"I knew it!" Xander exclaimed. "I _knew_ Vanna White had to be a vampire."

"No," Buffy said, stamping impatiently down the stairs.

"She's not?" Xander slumped.

"I don't know. Look, do you think I want to leave Spike sitting around in my house _by himself_? Unsupervised?"

The group gaze focused consideringly on him and he looked sourly back. Yeah, that was it. She'd dragged him along because he was such a hazard to the household furnishings. He'd keep that in mind, next time he went rummaging in her bedroom.

"But we said this was Scoobies only," Xander said.

"Well, Scoobies and significant others," said Willow, flashing Tara a smile and then shooting Buffy a glance of tentative apology. " 'Cause, you know, with the thing this week…"

"About which, can I just lodge a formal protest?" Xander said.

"You already did," said Willow. "Twice."

"Well, now it's Scoobies, S.O.'s, and Spike," Buffy said. "And hey, still alliterative." She turned to look at him, puzzled, as though he was some bizarre fashion ornament she'd forgotten the purpose of. "Look, he's here now, okay? So he stays."

A few shrugs were exchanged, and then that, apparently, was that.

Buffy landed Indian-style next to Riley. Spike considered the last open spot -- on the rug, between Buffy and Tara -- and then moved to Xander's shoulder. "Shove over."

"What?" Xander gave him a bug-in-my-Cheerios look. "Why?"

"You generally leave the child bearers to sit on the floor?" Spike said with enough sarcasm, he thought, to disguise how very little the prospect appealed. Bad enough the getting up and down, but his back would stage a revolt if he spent even five cross-legged minutes on that concrete.

"When they're, oh, _vampires_, I do," Xander said, but he shifted to make room nonetheless. Seemed a lifetime of socialization about pregnant women and bus seats had had their effect.

As everyone settled in to watch Anya's newfound shuffling talents, Spike stretched out in something approximating his old sprawl and said, "So, who's going to spot me?"

The faces turned to him. "What now?" Xander said.

"You lot do play for money, yeah?" He wouldn't have put it past them to bet Doritos or some such, but they were nodding. "So I haven't got any. Who'll spot me something to start with?"

Buffy had turned a ferocious general-purpose scowl on him.

"Not me," Xander said. "No way you're wiping out on my dime. Dimes."

Spike shrugged and looked towards Willow and Tara. "Ladies?"

"I-I have some extra," Tara said, offering a handful of pennies.

Spike eyed them. "Playing for the big stakes tonight, are we?"

"You don't have to play," Buffy said. "I mean, if the point of poker is money..."

"S'not." Spike scooped up the pennies and slipped his first hand of cards to his chest.

A couple of hands in he threw a potshot at Xander, and discovered, almost by accident, that he could win any skirmish just by being pregnant. He'd cast a slur on Xander's honor or his décor or his hair, let the boy froth a bit, and then his hand would fall to his stomach or he'd say something about being 'with child,' and Xander would pale just a little and drop the exchange. The girls looked on, eyes sparkling -- even Buffy's.

It was only to needle Xander that he turned casually to Anya and said, "You're looking particularly luscious this evening. New boyfriend?"

"Do you really think so?" Anya said, and by then Xander's strangled half-snort was secondary to the surprised light in the girl's eyes.

"Gentleman doesn't give a compliment he doesn't mean," Spike said, ignoring another snort from Xander on the word 'gentleman.' Rather than calling Spike on this stark untruth Anya just turned back to her cards, dimpling with a coyness he'd never have guessed at.

It was almost as much fun, a few minutes later, to tell her all the reasons she shouldn't have just won the pot, and have her unexpectedly turn on him and trash talk right back.

A while after that he figured out the merest lifted eyebrow in Tara's direction brought a blush, which was reason enough to send her lots of them, with an occasional sotto voce aside to Willow -- usually about threesomes -- that Xander clearly wished he could get away with saying.

By then Buffy had burned through her small pile of change and was only watching, the recumbent warrior, benevolent. She eyed each pot of coins with a certain glazed concentration that suggested she was seeing something else -- rival demon clans at battle, maybe.

He turned to her, innuendo on his tongue, and started, "So, Slayer…" Then his glance lifted to Riley snuggled behind her, and whatever Spike had meant to say was gone. He locked eyes for a moment with this boy, simpleton to the battle of light and dark in ways Xander had long grown out of.

Riley looked back, mistrustful and steely-eyed, with the faintest hint of revulsion as his gaze flicked down and back up again. It was a distant revulsion, impersonal, but then Spike wasn't a person, was he?

Buffy was twisting to look back and forth between them, expression confused, and Spike turned away. Not the proper venue. Ignore him and carry on; Spike was there on the Slayer's express invitation, after all. But the savor was gone.

For a moment he considered Riley's tidy stacks of change, and then he settled down to work.

It'd been years since his last card game with humans. Up to now he'd been heeding the players more than their playing, but all it took was a shift in attention to hear what these last few months had been teaching him to ignore: heartbeats. Near-silent intakes of breath. The stuttering of the brain as it processed each hand, expressed in signals only predators bothered to read.

It took him a few hands of play to get a baseline for Riley, to see how much it took to set his stolid Iowan heart racing. But then it was easy: measure his heart rate with vampiric accuracy, then bluff or call or fold as needed. He paid the others only scraps of attention, which was how Willow's flush surprised both his lovely straight and Riley's measly two pair. Still, there was a general trend of financial migration from Riley's corner to his.

The next hand was as good as Riley's last if he did anything but fold right off or win. Spike couldn't bluff him out on this one; Riley would pay to see the cards, chance or no. And he had a chance -- even adjusted for the frustration building just under his white bread surface, his pulse told Spike so. Mediocre, but with potential.

Spike considered his own smattering of oddments. He bet. Watched Riley raise and all but Anya fold. He was distractedly aware that the others were eyeing him and Riley carefully. He held himself stalking-still as he took his requested cards and considered his two pair -- eights and fours. Riley had something similar, he thought.

Another round of betting. Anya, after thrusting her cards in Xander's face and demanding advice, folded.

Riley raised again, with the last of his pennies. "Don't worry," he said, looking at Spike. "I can borrow more if I need to." No weaseling out because I'm broke, was what he meant.

No need, anyway; the winnings had nothing to do with this. Spike gave his two pair one last glance. Then he tossed the necessary pennies in and said thoughtfully, "Call."

Riley looked at him. He looked at Riley. Around them, the others leaned closer, waiting. "Anytime, guys," said Buffy.

He and Riley exchanged barely civil nods. Together, they laid their hands down.

Riley had sevens and threes.

"You were very close," Spike told Riley earnestly, frowning at the other's hand. "Too bad about that."

Riley was trying in his unmistakeably Midwester way not to scowl. For a moment he only shook his head, not looking at Spike. Eventually he wrapped Buffy in what had all the appearances of a goodbye hug, and then he shifted to stand.

"You don't have to leave," Buffy told him. "We could do something else..."

"Patrol?" he said. "It'd be great to work some kinks out." Stake some vampire ass, said the glance he gave Spike.

She grimaced. "Here, I meant. We could do something here. 'Cause later I have to take Spike home." Spike glared. Could she make him sound just a little bit more like a puppy in training? But she wasn't paying him any mind.

"That's okay," Riley said. "I think I just need to work out for a while. Me and my punching bag. You stay. Have fun." He stood. She followed him up the stairs and outside, where polite sensible kisses were no doubt exchanged on the sidewalk.

Meanwhile, the rest of the room felt as though it'd finally begun breathing again. Xander was explaining to Anya what would have happened if Riley'd had sevens and fives instead. Tara was shuffling, though Spike rather thought he'd sit out the next couple of hands.

Except, by the time Buffy got back he found himself hinting her homeward instead. Home was where the fridge was, after all, and that hollow feeling was opening up in him again. She shrugged, shoulders tight with a tension they hadn't had ten minutes ago, and agreed.

Goodbyes said, he and she took the stairs and followed the winding path of sidewalks and fenced-in alleys to Revello. At the house he took the direct route to the fridge and swallowed half a mug cold -- nasty way to take blood, even the human kind -- before he managed to fill the thing and start it to warming. By then his hands were trembling, apparently from the terrifying and arduous task of _walking home_.

His back, meanwhile, had nothing good to say about his time on Xander's broken-down couch, though they were more or less the same complaints he'd been feeling for some days now. He rolled his neck and thought, six more weeks. He was a vamp; this was mere discomfort compared to what Angelus had considered proper fledge training. Not to mention the games he and Dru got up to, with the spraining and occasional dislocation.

It didn't help. Neither did contorted rubbing at the parts that hurt.

"Achy?" Buffy said, walking into the kitchen.

"Little bit," he muttered. He hadn't meant her to see. "Don't suppose you'd care to do something about it?" he threw out, just so she'd leave him and his aches in peace.

But she didn't leave. After a pause, she said solemnly, "I'm told I give very firm back rubs. One of those Slayer perks."

He eyed her. Was this be-nice-to-Spike night? "I bet you do," he said. She stood with her arms crossed, expression blank as she watched him consider what those impossibly strong Slayer hands could do. "Have a go?" he said.

She pressed her lips thin, as though already regretting the almost-offer. "Just get comfy," she said. "Probably not on your stomach, huh?"

With a snort he took his warmed mug to the next room and straddled one of Joyce's dining chairs. Buffy pulled a second one behind him and sat. "Too much shirt," she said.

"Knew one day you'd start trying to undress me," he said, throwing a lecherous grin behind him. "More fun if you do it yourself."

"Yeah, because beach ball abs? _Totally_ my turn-on," she said. "Off with it."

"Beach ball…" He twisted around, sputtering. She lifted an eyebrow and looked pointedly down at him, and after another moment's glare he snorted and pulled off the t-shirt. Once he was settled again she laid her hands flat just below his ribs and began kneading.

"Bit lower down," he said. "Just above -- oh, bloody hell," he said as she worked at muscles that'd been strained for weeks. He rested his forehead on the back of the chair and closed his eyes. "You're a ministering angel, love."

"Yeah?" She sounded amused. "That's a new one. Especially from a vampire."

"In the wrong line of work, is all. I know a bloke runs a bath in Istanbul. Tends to have horns spiraling out of weird places, but he keeps to a contract. Could get him to take you on."

She snorted. "If I ever decide on a career change, I'll let you know. But I don't know how I feel about vampire massages, generally -- it's sort of ooky."

He twisted all the way around to glare at her. "Is that right."

"You're all cold and corpsey." She pinched a half-inch of skin.

"That trouble you much with Angel?" he said, stung. "Or did you have enough heat for the both of you?"

Her eyes flashed. "Just because I won't hurt your baby--" With one motion she twisted his arm behind his back and leaned.

"Ow!" he yelped. "Bloody hell, Slayer!"

"--doesn't mean I can't hurt you."

"All right. All right!"

She released him. "Some things aren't open for discussion."

"Got it," he mumbled sullenly. "Sorry." Behind him, she stilled, until finally he turned around again to see her staring at him. "What?"

She blinked, and then she shook her head and turned him back. "Since when in the history of ever do you apologize to me?"

He thought about that a moment and sighed. "Just since I lost my last shred of dignity."

"Then you're definitely easier to live with without your dignity."

"'Easy to live with,' " he repeated bitterly. "The ambition of my existence."

"I thought the ambition of your existence was to be a dad."

Hearing it spoken aloud still took his breath away. "Well. Yeah. Now it is."

"Weird. You're a _weird_ vampire."

"I think 'unique' is the word you're looking for."

She snorted. "That, too."

A few blissful moments later, a thought occurred. "Slayer?"

"Mm," she said.

"I've got another doctor's appointment Thursday. Same place as last time." He shot her a corner-of-his-eye glance. "Was hoping for a little protection on the fraught and perilous journey."

"Thursday." She bit her lip. "At night?"

"Yeah. Eight thirty." When she didn't reply, he twisted to see what the hesitation was. "Slayer calendar already booked up?" he said. "Could see about rescheduling. Doubt I'll be in very long -- just a general 'still pregnant' check, I think."

"No, Thursday could work," she said. "Yeah. I can do the bodyguard thing, as long as we come straight back afterwards."

Likely a date with Honorable Discharge, he thought. Had the boy ever seen her eyes flash -- in anger, granted -- the way Spike did when he slid a bit of innuendo her way? He considered that a moment while her thumbs worked spirals of pleasure-pain above his shoulder blades, and he decided, with a certain smug satisfaction, that Riley probably hadn't.

Finally the wonderful hands fell away from his back. "Okay, whatever I haven't done yet isn't getting done."

He gave a last groan of appreciation, and then another, different one as he straightened and all the weight pulled in the usual places again -- but not so insistently now. Not for a little while yet. "Ta," he said, rolling his shoulders loose. "Any chance of a repeat sometime?"

She shrugged, just the faintest hint of a smile pulling at her mouth. "Depends on how I feel about you that day."

"Doesn't it always," he said, snatching up his t-shirt.

"So that thing with Riley..."

He turned. "Yeah?" he said, wary. Best to keep it to himself; the boy was her squeeze, after all.

"That was quite the impressive bankrupting you did there -- in the middle of some way manly passive-aggression, let me add."

He shrugged. No point putting the household harmony in jeopardy. "Have to know when to hold 'em--"

"And when to make origami," she muttered, rolling her eyes. "I know, I know."

"Well." Sod it. Too good not to tell.

He explained.

"_That's_ the point of poker," he finished.

From the look on her face, he judged it was a good thing he'd waited until after the massage.


	22. Chapter 22

It seemed everyone but Spike had big plans for the evening. Joyce dropped him and the girls off at Stacey's office and then disappeared to do, as Dawn put it, 'Mom things,' leaving them to walk home afterwards. Buffy had her unspecified agenda. Even Dawn seemed in a rush to be elsewhere; her only comment on the ooze-seeping Seebian-Hortasch symbiotic pair was that it'd better not be there to see Stacey, because Spike had gotten there first.

After Stacey had ushered them in, she weighed him and then did that thing with her hands all over his belly that looked no less like magic when she did it than when Tara did. Another listen to the heartbeat. Another ultrasound and some unworried hmm-hmming from her that he took for encouragement.

"I'm very pleased with her progress," Stacey said finally. She settled on her swivel stool and gestured that he could pull his shirt back down. "You've still been feeding on human blood?"

"Yeah," Spike said, giving Buffy one wary glance.

"It's made a difference to both of you, I think. You've put on quite a bit of weight since last visit--"

"I'd noticed," he said sourly.

She gave him the universal reproving maternal frown of Don't-Interrupt. "Some of it's from the... baby." She flashed Dawn a glance and a lip-twitch that might have been a smile. "Which is very good to see. That's what I was most worried about. A lot of the weight's from the artificial support system -- uterus and so on -- expanding to accommodate the baby's growth. And it appears that some of it is your own vampire physiology trying to compensate for your, hmm, increasing surface area."

"Brilliant."

"No, no, it really is a very good thing. Before this I couldn't have even guessed how the semi-mystical biology would respond to this kind of intrusion. Structurally, the compensation I'm seeing is the best outcome I could hope for.

"So, overall, I'd say the human blood has been a significant improvement."

Moment of truth. He looked to Buffy, expecting even now to see discomfort, a sort of constipated regret over feeding him the life fluids of that most privileged of species, homo sapiens sapiens.

Calmly, neutrally she met his eyes, and then she shrugged.

So that was that, then.

"Now, how are you feeling generally?" Stacey said, clipboard in hand once again.

"Pregnant," he said. "Not that I'd know." Funny how, even without the repeated references to his host/parasite situation, ten minutes of Stacey's dispassionate analysis reminded him what an unnatural predicament he was in. Call it pregnancy if you like, but what he really had was a bloody foreign object crammed behind his much-abused abs.

Funny, too, how easily and often he forgot that.

"Not to mention he's the Incredible Sleeping Vampire," Buffy was saying.

"Hey!" he said. "Any wonder a bloke'd rather have a lie down than listen to you lot chattering on like a bunch of jaybirds?"

"Whatever," Dawn said. "You fell asleep during Passions. _Passions_, Spike."

"Show's gone completely daft lately," he muttered.

"I think," said Stacey, "that I'd like to speak with Spike alone."

He glared at them as they left, and Dawn rolled her eyes at him.

"So tell me just how much you've been sleeping lately," Stacey said.

He shrugged. "S'not like I've got a lot else going on just now."

"How much sleep?"

It took him a moment's thought. "My hours are a bit off, living with humans. Up around noon, blood, watch telly or whatever with Dawn. Usually end up resting a bit around fourish -- Joyce gets home at six, and I like being around for dinner. Bed at midnight or thereabouts."

"You're a vampire and you're going to bed at midnight?"

"Said my hours were off."

"Spike, you're sleeping fourteen hours a day." She made a note on her chart and rested it on her knee. "Anything else bothering you?"

He hesitated, and an eyebrow lifted above Stacey's sensible black frames. He sighed. "Sometimes I get the shakes. Like, coming out of a battle, or when I've been running about too much. Or," he added, thinking of poker night, "sometimes when I'm just hungry. But all's right once I get some blood down."

She frowned as she noted this down. "What happens if you don't?"

"Haven't really tried finding out."

"Don't," she said, tone sharp. "I can't predict what would happen if you strayed outside the parameters for this..." Her expression soured. "This apparatus you've been fitted with. And tell me immediately if you notice anything else unusual."

She asked Buffy and Dawn back in then, and proceeded to tell them the same thing -- _anything_ odd should be reported, and never mind what Spike might think about it. The question of important and unimportant symptoms was not their judgment call, she said. _Call me_, she said. The girls nodded, serious, apparently prepared to tie him down and cart him in for his own good, if it came to that. Which ought to have irritated him to no end, and somehow didn't.

~*~*~

Spike realized as he came in sight of the Summers porch swing that the girls had fallen behind. He turned to find them casting Significant Looks back and forth.

"Thought you had somewhere to be?" he said to Buffy as she caught up. "Parties to grace, a soldier to shag? Excuse me, ex-soldier."

"We're giving you a baby shower," blurted Dawn.

He stopped cold to stare at her. "A what now?"

"A baby shower," Buffy supplied. "As in, people shower baby stuff upon you."

"For me," he said, disbelieving.

"Duh, for you," said Dawn. "You with the baby."

He scowled. "What is it, wrap Spike up in pink bows night? Ta, but no."

"No pink bows. Anyway, you don't get a choice," Buffy said, taking his elbow firmly in hand and drawing him forward. "Once Willow gets an idea -- especially a _party_ idea…. And she's got this thing for surprises, which I so wanted to kill her for this one time. Anyway, just be surprised, okay? Don't tell her we ratted her out."

"But…" By then they were up the porch steps and Dawn was turning the doorknob, and the interior was unnaturally quiet considering all the heartbeats crowded in it. Then they turned the corner and…

"Surprise!" Save Riley and Giles, the entire crew was gathered in the Summers living room: Joyce, the witches, Harris and the demon girl.

"Slayer…" Spike hissed.

Low enough that only he could hear, she said, "Don't be a jerk, Spike," and then she steered him in.

He dimly recalled a time, no more than a few months ago and unimaginably distant, when he could command any situation with a few well-timed words -- or equally well-timed punches, if the words failed. When he wanted the spotlight he grabbed it, and when he didn't no one saw him but the shadows.

But that time was clearly long past, because a shadow seemed a very welcome place just now and yet he allowed Buffy and Dawn to guide him to the place of honor, the stuffed chair from the corner of the living room now set at the head of the coffee table. A huddle of packages wrapped in pastels sat to one side.

At least there weren't any streamers.

Cupcakes were passed around. Dawn brought him blood -- surprise, surprise. It wasn't that the demon _ever_ tired of blood, but Spike thought his human palate might shrivel up and die -- again -- of the ecstasy of one decent buffalo wing.

"Willow's idea, you said?" he asked Buffy in an undertone.

She took a swallow of her punch. "Well, at first it was just the -- well, one of the presents. Then it sort of morphed." She grimaced. "Willow projects are hardly ever the same shape for long, you know? But there was definitely some joint plannage."

"I'll bite her," he muttered. "I get this chip out, there'll be a reckoning."

Buffy snorted and nibbled off another bite of cupcake.

From the couch, Anya said, "So, does the small human have a name?"

Spike swallowed the last gulp of blood. "Haven't decided yet."

"Spi-i-ike," said Dawn, mouth crumby with frosting. "You've had _months_ to think about her name."

He _had_ thought about it, playing possibilities over in his head. But he couldn't see her to match them to her face, and he wasn't about to just slap some name on her to get himself over the hurdle of deciding.

"How about Christina?" said Dawn.

"_No_," said Spike. "I'm not naming her after some bubble-gum pop princess."

"Maybe Birch?" said Willow. "It's got that back-to-nature cachet."

"Plus," Tara said, "tree names? Always in fashion."

Willow grinned at her.

"Dusk," said Dawn. "It's like Dawn, only, you know, not."

"Have you thought about naming her after a relative?" asked Joyce. "That was traditional when you were alive, wasn't it?"

"Yeah..."

"Maybe after your mother?" she said.

He'd given that some thought. Would it honor her, or would it just keep him remembering his first truly spectacular screw-up as a vampire? Regardless, didn't his girl need her own name?

"What was her name?" Joyce asked.

"Anne," he said.

"Ooh, that's Buffy's middle name!" said Dawn.

Well. So much for that.

"There are certain ancient demons who bless children given their names," said Anya. "I could give you a list."

"Anya!" exclaimed Xander. "Spike's not naming his kid after a demon."

"Why not? _He's_ a demon."

Xander's flash of chagrin suggested that he'd forgotten.

"I'm not naming her anything," Spike said.

"That's quite unusual," Anya said. "You know, nameless children generally grow up to have destinies. They become wandering heroes or impossibly beautiful maidens or wicked sorcerers. Are you sure you want that?"

No, he did _not_ want that. "I mean, I'm not naming her yet. Not until I know for sure who she is." Spike scowled inside his empty mug and then waved it at Dawn. "Refill?" She scurried off.

When she'd come back, Willow stood up with a glass of punch and dinged her fork against it. "Okay! Okay, so we have food, and no games, it turns out--"

"You're welcome," Buffy murmured to Spike.

"So I think it's presents time." Her grin was positively beatific as everyone turned to Spike.

"She's not serious," Spike muttered to Buffy.

"Who did you think all the boxes were for?"

Something broke. "What _is_ this?" he hissed.

"What's what?" Buffy leaned back and peered to inspect a toenail, unconcerned.

"_Why are you lot being nice to me?_" he asked, and then, seeing all the faces on him, realized his voice had risen. Now that he was looking back, the gazes turned down, away, while the fingers picked at hems and knapkins.

"Wow, way to bring the awkward silence," Buffy said. "Nice job."

"Well?" he pressed, ignoring the other glances. "What's this all about? Prezzies? A party?"

Spell? Possession by some spirit with a peculiar sense of humor?

Brow knit, Buffy said, "Um, not sure what you're getting at. You have noticed, right, that you're living in my house?"

"It's for you," Dawn added, her puzzlement just bordering on hurt.

"That's the part that's got me twitchy," he said.

"It's okay," Xander said from across the room. "I don't get it either."

"Haven't we already had this conversation?" Buffy asked. "We don't hate you anymore. Mostly. Except for the cigarette butts."

"Well, yeah, but..." That hardly covered it.

"And it's for the baby, too," Willow said.

"Yeah," Buffy said. "Most of the presents are really just baby supplies. Like you said before. Group project."

While he was forming a response -- though what sort of response, he didn't know yet -- Joyce walked in with a new tray of cupcakes. She eyed the clusters of averted faces. "Everything okay in here?"

"Spike's just being hormonal," Buffy said.

"I... You..." He huffed. "I don't even _have_ hormones."

"Pretty good trick, then," she said. "You must be a very talented vampire."

Joyce considered them both a moment longer, and then said, "_I_ think it's time for presents."

Buffy looked questioningly at Spike. "We done angsting?"

It was that imperturbable calm, as much as anything, that decided him. "Yeah, all right."

Handed the first package and feeling all those eyes on him, he glared balefully at the offending curly ribbon until Buffy whispered at vamp-only volume, "You have to. It's for the baby." He turned the glare on her but it did nothing to dim her smirk, and finally he surrendered and tore the tissue paper off.

From Dawn and Buffy, a collection of impossibly tiny clothes and several packages of disposable diapers. From Dawn alone, a coupon for an indeterminate number of diaper changings, "After Mom shows me how."

From Joyce, an entire box of items, 'gently used,' as she put it, the purposes of some of which completely escaped him.

From Anya, a card which promised, in script centuries older than his, babysitting 'in extreme emergencies _only_.' He raised a brow at her as he read this, but the brilliant smile of self-satisfaction she flashed him stilled his questions about the phrasing.

From Anya and Xander together -- though he knew which of them had funded it -- a gift certificate to a local baby store, which Joyce promised to help him navigate. He looked to Xander for a grimace or an eye-roll or _something_ that'd serve as recognition of this unwonted expenditure of Harris greenbacks, but all he got was a shrug.

From the witches, a blank book for 'Baby's First Year,' several more sleepers that the other girls exclaimed over, and a sort of open plastic box full of rags and bottles of the lotion variety, all wrapped up in cellophane. "Bath stuff" was Willow's explanation. Spike eyed the conglomeration and decided he'd have to get Joyce aside about that, too.

Finally, Willow handed him two cardboard garment boxes. "This is where we got the baby shower idea from," she said. "Only, they're kind of more for you than the baby."

"Dare I ask?" he said.

"You should probably just open them," replied Willow. "They're from the three of us." She nodded to Tara and Dawn, both bright-eyed and crowding in to see. "Plus Buffy's mom." He glanced over her head to Joyce, who smiled demurely.

Cautiously he untied the ribbon of the first box and pulled the top off. "My trousers?" he said. Only they weren't, he saw as he lifted them out -- at least, not as he'd seen them last, stashed under the futon for the hopeful far-off day when they fit again. The waistband and belt loops were gone now, cut cleanly away and replaced with a wide strip of something black and stretchy.

"We kind of stole them," Dawn said, hesitant. "Mom did the alterations."

"I should have thought of this a month ago," Joyce said, coming to lean against the arm of his chair. "When I was pregnant with Buffy, maternity clothes were terrifying. Tents. They were tents with stripes. " She made a reminiscent grimace. "So I altered all my pants, right up to the whale stage. Then _everything_ was a tent."

In a voice pitched only for her, he said, "Bet you were still gorgeous."

Her reply was a roll of the eyes and a shake of the head, but she pinked pleasantly. "Anyway, we can still make adjustments -- I just guesstimated to start. Try them on later and tell me how they fit."

God, how he hated sweatpants. He fingered the comfortably weathered black denim, mutilated for the cause, and then laid them aside with the suspicion that if he'd been alone he might have kissed them. "Thanks," he said and she squeezed his shoulder before going to sit down on the sofa.

"Keep going," Dawn said.

Lying atop a second similarly altered pair was a set of braces, also black.

"In case the elastic doesn't keep the jeans up," Willow said.

"You realize, I've only got six weeks to go," he said.

She shrugged.

"Right, then." Putting aside that box, he untied the second one and pulled out the first of a stack of t-shirts.

"W-we think we got the size right," Tara said. "So you can wear them until she's born."

"_And_ show off the baby belly a little," said Willow. "'Cause you know, no point hiding the miracle of life!"

He looked to Buffy for some assurance that the insane person in the room wasn't him. She gave him a full-shouldered shrug, eyes glimmering amusement. Whispering, she said, "You should have seen some of the other stuff they looked at. You're lucky it's just t-shirts."

"So hold them up," Dawn said.

The first two were plain, solid, respectable black. But the third, also black, had a figure printed on it in teal. "All right..." he said, peering at it. "Indulging our marine biology fetish, are we?"

"Turn it around so we can see," said Joyce.

When he did, it was Xander who started giggling. "And you gave me a hard time about the Discovery Channel."

"It's a seahorse," Dawn said.

"Yeah, I got that... oh, bloody hell."

"Nature's male incubators," said Willow proudly.

There was an unsteady moment while he balanced between simple fury and the acute self-consciousness that, by dint of much careful not-thinking, he'd managed to avoid all this time. Then he caught Dawn's eye on him, bright with mischief and yet the least bit uncertain.

He mustered a deep mental breath and squashed both impulses. "Well. Right." He lifted his glance, searching for some smidgen of sympathy, and found just a glimmer of it in Joyce's eyes -- or maybe that was a twinkle. "Least I'll still be gorgeous, yeah?" he said. The twinkle brightened.

"So you like it?" Dawn asked.

"S'fine," he said, and then it was. He set the box aside, half-unpacked -- he'd spotted something pink near the bottom and, however long-suffering, he could only take so much. "Later, yeah?" Glimpsing Willow's pouty face, he smirked to himself. The girl needed a bit of thwarting now and then.

After that, as though he'd walked the coals and been found acceptable, the conversation turned from him to other topics: slaying and school and whether there were any cupcakes left. Dawn brought him more blood, Joyce and Xander headed out to the kitchen for soda, and he thought he might get out all of this with his dignity intact.

Until Willow said, "So, Spike, Tara says the baby's probably moving a lot."

Spike snatched his hand away from where, empty and unoccupied, it had fallen. It was one thing to harass Xander with the evidence, and something else to actually talk about it. Her activities were none of their business, were they?

But everyone was looking at him now and, short of staging a medical emergency, he wasn't getting out of this. "Yeah," he said.

"Like, now?" Willow persisted.

Spike glanced sideways at nothing, anything, and then back to her face, avid as a terrier. It was the face of a Willow who _would_ find out what she wanted to know. "Some," he said.

"Can I feel her?"

"No," Spike said quellingly.

"Please?" asked Willow. "I won't hurt her."

"Er." He looked over at Buffy, half-wishing she'd lay down one of those incomprehensible Slayer directives. Her faint amusement did him no good at all. With an uncertain glance at Willow and another back at Buffy, he said, "All right."

Willow came and sat in front of him and then cautiously laid her hand against the loose cotton of his t-shirt, ducking so that he was staring into a thick full head of red Willow-hair.

For a moment they sat like that, frozen, while his girl kicked at places that weren't Willow's hand. "Bit lower," he said. "Round to the side?"

Intent, Willow followed his instructions. Two more heartbeats of silence, and then tiny unborn heel connected with palm and Willow squealed. Leaning closer, she crooned, "Hel-_lo_ there, Spike-baby."

One day in Giles' apartment, months ago, she had looked up from her laptop, on which she was _supposed_ to be decrypting his files, to whisper that some witches could make fire. Now she was glowing up at him with eyes just as wide and filled with almost as much delight. He found himself smiling cautiously back.

"I want to feel the tiny human," Anya declared. She rounded the coffee table and then, in an unsuspected display of manners, waited for Spike's nod before she knelt on his other side and laid both hands expectantly on his stomach.

She didn't have long to wait. "I felt it." She pulled back one hand to wrinkle her brow at it. "She was kicking?"

"If you want to call it that," he said. He shifted to lay his own hand where Anya's had been. "Think she's practicing for that star goal-kicker position."

"And she does this a lot?" Anya pressed.

He snorted. "Yeah. Hardly stops anymore."

"Does it hurt?" Willow asked.

Somehow, this conversation had begun to feel natural. "Sometimes. When she connects with my spine or my ribs. Or sometimes she just likes pushing on things."

"What about the other times?" Anya said. "Is it ever pleasant?"

He thought about startling suddenly awake and then realizing what had woken him. He thought about the flush of feeling each time she seemed to settle at his voice -- though, ponce that he was, that was quite possibly his imagination. He thought about all those moments when he roused from whatever he'd been thinking on to remember that the weight wriggling in his belly was his _ daughter_.

What he said was, "S'nice always knowing where she is."

Joyce and Xander walked in, balancing plastic cups. Anya turned to them and said, "Xander, when we have kids I think you should have them."

Spike could've kissed Anya for the expression on Xander's face -- not that that'd be a terribly onerous task. Well, he'd have kissed Xander, then.

Xander, now turned rather white, spun and walked right back out of the room.

Anya rose and followed him. "There are spells that enable male pregnancy--"

From the hall, "No!"

Still chuckling, Spike turned to Buffy, watching all from the sofa. "You want to cop a feel, now's the time." He grinned at her sudden alarm. "There's a spot open."

"Uh, no thanks," she said, arms folding in a shield across her chest. "You guys go ahead."

Dawn and Tara were already settling at his feet, side by side, hands out. Now there were three heads softly gleaming around him: red, ash-blond, chestnut. He considered the hands splayed over his stomach, the touches light, the palms warm and gentle against him as they waited. He took a long, slow breath, and he waited with them.


	23. Chapter 23

There were only so many housebound nights a vamp could take. One night when Spike's patience was ready to snap as quick and sudden as a rubber band, Xander dropped by with Anya, looking for Buffy. Barely were they in the door when Anya began exclaiming over the hideous fertility statues Joyce had just brought home from the gallery; apparently she'd once done a series of vengeances for the entire tribe from which it'd come. Joyce got that brilliant connoisseur's gleam in her eye and guided Anya to the couch.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Xander," Joyce said, glancing to where he stood squinting warily at a piece. "Buffy's out with Willow tonight."

Xander eyed them, already turned back to fervent artistic conversation, and slumped. In sudden decision, Spike pushed out of the couch and gripped Xander's arm. "I'm commandeering your honey," he called to Anya.

"What?" She glanced between them. "What do you want him for?"

"Manly pursuits," Spike said. "Not that I'm sure you qualify," he added, looking Xander up and down critically.

"Look who's talking, Mr. Mom!"

"So," Anya said, "you're going to get very drunk and compare the length of one another's penises?"

"Um," said Xander.

"You're going to yell frequently while watching men run around after leather balls."

"Manly pursuits," Spike repeated firmly, and dragged Xander towards the door -- or tugged, rather, since anything firmer would only get him a headache.

"Don't break him," Anya called.

Spike pushed Xander ahead and shoved the door shut behind them, and then guided him none too gently down the sidewalk. At the car he let go and was contemplating the low drop into the passenger seat when Xander said over the sun roof, "Hold up. Wait. Why am I taking you anywhere?"

"Because," Spike said flatly, "if I don't get out of that house for a few hours my entire wardrobe is going to spontaneously turn pink." These last few weeks, even the mystifying shopping expeditions had ceased; it seemed the basement might finally be at least minimally prepared for a new arrival. Not to mention that Spike was well into the 'bloody conspicuous' stage now.

With Xander eyeing him suspiciously, Spike was sure he'd turn him down, which was likely going to lead to Spike doing something destructive -- to the shrubbery, maybe -- that he'd have to be sorry for later. But maybe a bit more desperation had slipped into his voice than he meant; after regarding him a moment more, Xander shrugged. "Fine. Okay. But I'm not taking you anywhere looking like that."

"Like?" Spike glanced down at his t-shirt pulled taut over his belly, broad and round and unmistakably pregnant. He reached to begin buttoning his duster, only to realize that he'd left it in the house in his hurry -- and not one step back was he going, in case someone decided no less than the Slayer herself was fit to escort him anywhere anymore. "Oh, all right," he said, crossing his arms. "I'll just take a deep breath and suck my gut in."

Xander shook his head. He ducked into the back seat and came back up with a spattered gray sweatshirt that he tossed to Spike. "Here."

"The height of Harris fashion," Spike said. He sighed as he pulled the bulky knit cotton over his head. It would have been a bit oversized on Xander, which meant it had just enough room for him: snug but not stretched.

"Great," Xander said. "Now you look less, less..."

"Less like I'm due in three weeks and more like I've spent the last fifteen years at a kegger," Spike finished.

"Definite improvement," Xander said. "Now, just don't go… touching it, and we'll be okay."

"You mean like this?" Smirking, he cradled his stomach and slipped down into the car while Xander was still making gagging noises.

Doors shut and keys hanging in the ignition, Xander said, "Okay, where are we going?"

Spike gave him an address, and for a few moments it was peaceful: no feminine hovering. No advice. No concerned inquiries about his physical well-being -- he was a _vampire_, for bloody sake; health didn't even come into it.

"So, going a little stir-crazy?"

"You had better not be trying to sympathize," Spike said. "Else I'd have to eat you."

Xander snorted. "That's pretty funny, Fangless." But the rebuff apparently dampened the fellow-feeling somewhat. He didn't say any more until they came to the deserted lot, the DeSoto's grill peeking out from the shed. "Oh, man. Spike..."

"If I was going to run off, I'd have done it months ago when I looked" -- and felt -- "less like a hippopotamus. I just need to get something out of the boot." Spike opened the door, got one leg out, and-- "Oh, bloody hell." Damn Xander for his puddle-jumper, its bucket seats, and its miniscule eight-inch clearance. Spike wrapped a hand over the top edge of the door and shoved against the seat with the other, but the angle was all wrong and there was just too much baby in the way to get himself up.

Feeling Xander lasering holes in his skull, he contemplated the pavement for a moment, and then leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. "Never mind," he said, defeated. "Just--" he flicked his hand. "Just take me home."

"Hello, I am _not_ your chauffeur." Xander got out and slammed his door. In a moment, there was a warm-blooded human skin not too far from Spike's nose. He opened his eyes, stared at Xander's impassive face for a moment, and then gripped the proffered hand. After a joint effort, he was out and standing upright.

"Right. Well." He stalked into the shed, lifted the DeSoto's back gate, and began rummaging.

"You know, we on the winning side of the Revolutionary War call that a 'trunk'," Xander called from just outside the shed.

"Yeah." He'd forgotten he had so much junk stashed here. "You realize, they didn't have telly when I was turned. And it's not like I've spent the last hundred-odd in Merry Olde." Oh, look, that axe with the nicked blade he thought he'd left behind in Rio. "So why d'ya suppose I call it that, and not 'TV' like you Yanks?" And that pair of novelty knives Dru'd been so dazzled with... hel-_lo_.

"Um... Sheer perversity?"

Spike slipped one out of its sheath and lifted it to what passed for the light. He slid his thumb along the grain of the blunt wooden blade. And the point... Still sharp, even after bumping around in there so long. That whiff of preservative mysticism he'd been promised must have held true. He licked the drop of blood welling from his finger.

Belatedly, he heard what Xander had said. He chuckled. "Close enough. Figure, if I don't keep being where I'm from, I won't be from anywhere at all." He stuck the knives in his... nope, he wasn't _wearing_ his duster. He slid around the side of the car and handed the knives to Xander: one sheathed, one not. "Hold these."

"What are... ouch!"

Chuckling again, Spike returned to shoving odds and ends out of the way. Had to move the whole lot of it aside to find the... there it was, the square of loose carpet. A little tug, and he had his last, most secret stash of bills beneath his fingers. The shed was too dark to tell the colors, so he fisted the entire stack in one hand and slammed the gate down with the other.

"How much is that?" Xander asked as he stared, his tone half-suspicious and half-awed.

"Not so much as you'd think. Here, these blokes have been out of business for years." He handed Xander a Soviet ruble. "Wonder if the deutschmarks are still good, what with the euro and all? God, I've been stuck in this bleeding hemisphere so long."

Most of it was still in reais from that Brazilian jaunt, with a few pesos and Honduran lempiras thrown in for good measure. But when the green Uncle Sams were all sorted, he had enough, he thought, to finance most of the few luxuries he had in mind. He laid the money atop the knives cautiously cradled in Xander's hands and stuffed the rest back under the DeSoto's carpet. Then, having rescued both the dollars and the knives, he said, "Shall we be off, then?"

"Yeah, okay," Xander said. "Where are we going, again?"

But Spike was leaning on the open passenger door, considering the stained, threadbare passenger seat.

"You're not going to make a scene every time I help you up, are you?"

Spike glanced up and eyed him carefully, but though the boy looked mildly amused -- as well as mildly irritated -- any inclination to laugh was manfully held in. "No," Spike said finally. The knives tossed in the back and the money in his jeans pocket, he dropped down in.

"So, destination," Xander said as they pulled onto the street. "Exactly what sort of stag night did you have in mind?" He folded his laced fingers out backwards and cracked his knuckles. "We've got your billiards, we've got your televised prize fights--"

"You know that bookstore on Main, by the magic shop?"

"Yes?" How this was relevant to the discussion, Xander clearly refused to imagine.

"Shouldn't be closed yet -- they like to catch the arty crowd, and it's open mic night over at the coffee place."

Xander draped his arms over the steering wheel and stared. "You dragged me out of the house to go _shopping_?"

"Yeah," Spike said in his best impression of Dawn's duh-voice.

A moment for Xander to examine his face and conclude that yes, Spike really was serious. He heaved a sigh. "All righty then. Main it is."

Spike had only been in the shop once or twice before. Thus he didn't know the proprietors, which meant they couldn't whisper to each other about how he'd let himself go; and he'd never lifted anything, which meant he'd feel slightly less ridiculous about paying for something now.

Xander came around to Spike's door and wordlessly helped him up. Inside, Spike left him stammering a question about where they kept their comics -- good luck with that -- and wound through the labyrinth of ceiling-high shelves to a particularly unloved-looking corner in the back. For a college town bookstore, the selection was shoddy: mostly these insipid modern Poet Laureates that wouldn't know a decent meter if it bit them in the jugular.

And Plath -- well, the Lady Lazarus, she was always good for a laugh. That one July in Reykjavik, when Dru was off prancing about with that Shiraka and twilight didn't come until midnight, Plath had kept him in good company.

Spike leafed through, recalling fondly, 'One year in every ten...' Then further back, and... oh.

_I'm a riddle in nine syllables,  
An elephant, a ponderous house…_

He snapped it shut, cast one self-conscious glance to the empty aisle behind him, and then slid the book back onto the shelf.

But here was a volume of Keats, too -- he'd rather fancied himself as Keats, the young tragic genius, at least until the miserable day he'd begun to realize how little Keats' words and his had in common. Later it'd been Byron, of course, all dark heroes with vengeful purposes and a taste for violence. And later still he'd had Poetry herself squirming under him and whispering in his ear, and he hadn't needed the words at all. Until now.

"Spike?"

He shut the book. "Find your Frivolous Four, did you?"

Xander shook his head. "She gave me this look, and then she showed me the 'graphic novels' ----- which, seriously? If you don't have Alan Moore, you don't have graphic novels.

"So whadja find?" He peered over Spike's shoulder. "Romance poetry?" He stared at the book, as aghast as if Spike had just betrayed his entire gender.

"The _Romantics_, you moronic sod." No light dawned. "Literary movement. All about passion and forces of nature, and an orgy now and then. None of which _you_ know anything about."

"Poetry." Xander regarded him with a sort of awed disbelief. "Your 'manly pursuit' is _poetry_."

"As opposed to what, your kiddie picture books? That's the height of masculine maturity, right there."

"Hey!"

Spike left him sputtering to go pay for his _Portable Romantic Poets_.

After the bookstore came the combination music and video store two streets east of the UC-Sunnydale campus. It was the video rentals -- especially the ones behind the back curtain -- that kept the place open this late, but it was the music Spike had come for tonight. He nodded to Del, whose clientele had died less frequently once Spike discovered his fine taste in punk, and went to flip through the racks. He snagged the necessities: Sid, the Ramones, _The Scream_.

He paid, frustrated anew at how quickly money spent when the two-fanged discount wasn't an option. But he now he had his music -- or at least the bare beginnings thereof -- and in the car were Keats and Byron both, and that was worth the depletion of the emergency stash. Emergencies were relative things.

"Where next?" asked Xander in the car, hands on the wheel and apparently resigned to chauffer duties after all.

"That's it," Spike said. "Got what I came for. Take me home, and then you and Demon Girl can put some more work into killing that mattress of yours properly dead."

"Are you serious?" Xander said. "That's it? No man-time in front of the TV, no unhealthy snack foods?"

"Blood diet, remember?" Spike said. Speaking of which, he was hungry again, despite having basically no capacity anymore. Also, his back was pleading for a Slayer-strength massage. "Home."

After Xander pulled in at the Summers's curb, he said, "So, I've gotten all the gratitude I'm going to get, haven't I? 'All' meaning 'none.'"

"What, you expect the evil creature of the night to say thank you?"

Xander snorted and reached for the handle.

"How's your arm?" Spike said.

"My... oh." Xander started rolling up his sleeve -- which was, it occurred to Spike, a bit long to be worn in the middle of August. He squinted in the near-dark to better see the half-dozen blood-purple crescent moons spotting Xander's arm.

"Soloveno demon," he said. "Slayer didn't say it was one of those. Stung a bit, those bites?"

Xander's harsh half-chuckle said enough. "I'm still working on a story for them. You know, a saga of heroism for the impressing of people. Especially girl-type people."

"A different saga than the one where you fought off the hordes of hell to keep a little girl fed."

Xander snorted. "Yeah, I was gonna push the credibility angle a bit more than that."

"Well." Spike took a breath. "Give it a few years and you can tell the truth, yeah? Tell that one little girl how you didn't let her go hungry."

Xander regarded his arm a moment longer, and turned the gaze on Spike a moment before he nodded. "Yeah, okay."

He got out and came around to Spike's side. "So what happened to all the super strength?" Xander asked, pulling him up. "Why the need for a helping hand?" Again, not laughter, exactly, although Spike suspected he was saving some for later. Mostly he just sounded curious.

"It's not just strength," Spike grumbled. "It's a problem of leverage."

"Oh?"

"I haven't got any." He bent as best he could and collected the night's prizes. "Besides, your rattletrap's a failure at accessibility for pregnant persons. Ought to be a law." He slammed the door, and something under the hood rattled from the impact. "Not to mention, think your paper clips and duct tape are about to give out on you."

"What did you think all the dead-end jobs were for? Wait, don't answer that." Xander patted the frame with rough affection, and then wrinkled his nose at the rust that came away on his fingers. "Another month and you'll see a new and improved Xandermobile."

Three more weeks, Spike reflected, and he and his DeSoto could start getting reacquainted.

Inside, the ladies were still on the sofa, though the fervor of the conversation had eased. From the ice tea glasses on the coffee table, forgotten and glistening with condensation, Spike guessed the topic had moved on as well. It occurred to him that a proper friendship with someone like Joyce might go a long way in ushering Demon Girl into that humanity she'd been groping towards. Not that he cared.

That Joyce might do the same for him wasn't something he was willing to consider just yet. Might as well hang onto the Big Bad illusion as long as he could, until that day it finally slipped like fog through his fingers.

"Spike! You're okay!" Dawn bounded down the stairs.

"Ye-e-es," he said, as she wrapped her arms around him -- quite the feat these days -- and squeezed. "Something afoot?"

"You went out without me _or_ Buffy," she said, and given her tone he marveled she wasn't actually wagging her finger at him. "Those vampires could have caught you, and there'd be nobody to protect you, and--"

"Hey, now!" he said, extricating himself. "Also a vamp, in case you'd forgotten. Still not entirely incompetent at the life and limb game." _Entirely_ being the operative word. " 'Sides, I had the human mop along for the guarding of my person. Persons."

"Xander?" she whispered doubtfully, wrinkling her nose. "Whatever." Louder, "What are you wearing?"

A glance down reminded him. He stripped off the sweatshirt and tossed it at Xander's head. "Suppose you don't want your present, then?" he asked Dawn, and held back a smirk as all concern vanished, a soap bubble burst by a water hose.

"Present? What is it? You got me a present? Gimme, gimme, _please_?"

He glanced at the faces behind him, starting to turn interest in his direction. "Basement," he said. He flicked a hand in farewell to the others. "Ta," he told Xander, comfortably certain that the boy wouldn't actually know what that meant, and then he followed Dawn down.

"So what is it?" she said, when he reached the bottom of the steps.

He handed her the shopping bag from the bookshop, its contents now exchanged. "Careful," he said as she dumped the bag out on the futon.

"More knives?" she said, looking uncertainly over at him.

"Look at the blades," he said.

She lifted one to the light and peered at the grain. "It's pretty," she said, still doubtful.

"It's wood," he said.

She frowned a moment longer, and then squealed. "Staking knives! Or, hey, stake knives." She paused to giggle. "And now I can kill vampires--"

"If your aim's good enough," he said, just as he was wrapped in another hug.

"Thank you, thank you thank you!"

"Have to be gentle with them, now," he said to the top of her head. "The blades have some protective mojo on them to save the points, but they're still fragile. We'll find you a softer target to practice with."

"You're my best friend _ever_," she said, pulling away to look at the knife again, eyes shining. She snatched the other off the bed and scrambled up the stairs. "I have to show these to Mom!"

When she was gone, he realized he'd forgotten to ask if Buffy was back. Well, maybe someone would wander down later and he could ask after that back rub. He considered the merits of warmed blood vs. not having to climb the stairs again, and eventually settled for a cold plastic bag from the mini fridge.

That drunk, he found a position among the futon's pillows that'd likely stay comfortable for at least twenty minutes and he opened up _Portable Romantic Poets_. "The musical education'll have to wait for another day, when I get hold of a player from someone," he explained softly. "Might could beg the Niblet's Walkman away from her, yeah? But for tonight it's words." He didn't immediately get a kick in the spleen, which he took for assent.

He leafed through the volume, getting caught by old favorites. Finally, in the Keats section, he began to chuckle. Might as well start her off with something appropriate to the situation. In his reading voice, which Mother had always said was particularly pleasant, he began,

"_Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness,  
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun..._"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. The line "One year in every ten" is from Plath's poem [Lady Lazarus](http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath/1404). Neither the peom nor the poet are generally considered to be terribly funny.
> 
> 2\. The Plath poem Spike stumbles across, beginning "I'm a riddle in nine syllables," is [Metaphors](http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/sylvia-plath/metaphors/).
> 
> 3\. The Keats at the end is [Ode to Autumn](http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Keats/to_autumn.htm), which may be my single favorite seasonal poem in all of literature.


	24. Chapter 24

Now it was just a matter of time and gestation.

A long consult was had with Dr. Einjarl, who huffed through his tusks and whiskers all the while. A date was scheduled for the surgery, during which Spike was going to _give birth_, more or less, and in all the oddities that was possibly even more boggling than the fact that there'd be a baby when it was over. Discussions were had about formula and feeding, and the question was raised -- and, to Spike's relief, immediately laid to rest -- of whether the Initiative had equipped him for that, too. They had not, so bottles it would be.

Meanwhile, he swore vengeance on the ghost of Isaac Newton for those two inexorable facts of physics: gravity and inertia. It felt as though he were fighting them at every turn.

"I can't _move_ properly," he complained to Joyce. "The strength I've still got, but speed, balance, reflexes -- they're all buggered to blazes." She gave him the smile of sympathetic superiority reserved for those who've been through it all before and managed very well, thank you.

He waddled. He, Spike, who'd spent over a century perfecting the swagger, waddled.

Now when Dawn came down to the basement for improvised darts, they switched off, she with her special walnut-bladed knife in her foam target, he with the steel blades on wood. Dawn won as often as not. If his center of gravity would just quit shifting with every ounce gained, Spike's aim might have stood a chance; as it was, he found himself consistently over- or under-compensating.

They were at it one day, a week and a half before _the_ day. Two hundred and forty-six hours. He lobbed a knife off in the general direction of the target, graceless but with enough force to make a satisfying thump in the wood anyway.

"It's like watermelon ballet," Dawn said suddenly.

"What is?" He flicked the other knife.

"You." She grinned at him, preening with mischief.

In the half-second of deciding whether to grin back or snarl at her, it came to him: _The melons shall dance and the turnips shall sing opera._

Dru.

He huffed a disbelieving laugh. Of course she'd known.

Hadn't seen fit to tell him in any words he might understand, but she'd seen him like this -- what had she made of it, him so heavy and sow-bellied? -- and heard Dawn's cheek. Dared he wonder what the bit with the turnips was about?

He slumped on the futon bed as it all rolled over him, the awkwardness and the aches and every single indignity, and the gasps of laughter that followed came accompanied with tears. If some of those tears were less for the comedy of it all than for Dru and the buggered ridiculous wondrous future she'd sent him off to, well, it seemed fitting enough.

"Spike?" Dawn sat on the bed next to him, blue eyes huge with earnestness. She picked at his blanket for a minute. "You're still sexy," she blurted.

He twisted to stare at her and regard the sudden flush. "What's that?"

She hunched up, arms folded awkwardly. "That's what people worry about when they're pregnant, right? That they're not sexy anymore? And then their boyfriend -- or girlfriend, I guess -- laughs and gives them a big sappy hug and tells them of course they are." She stared intently at the floor. "But you don't have anyone to tell you that. So." Deep breath. "Still sexy."

Not that this wasn't amusing, but he'd obviously missed the train of thought. He thought back… oh. "This about the watermelon thing?"

Her apologetic grimace was answer enough. "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings." Then Dawn flung herself in his arms, apparently to give him the aforementioned big sappy hug.

"So," he said into her hair, "Is this a proposition?"

A snort. "Whatever. You're like my older brother."

Since she wasn't looking at him, she couldn't see his face. Or his smirk. "You were just saying it, then. Didn't really mean it."

She pushed away and looked determined to reassure him without giving him any more ideas. When she saw the smirk, she slapped at his arm. "My _pregnant_ older brother."

"Ow! Careful, I'm fragile."

*~*~*

An hour later, he was occupying his time by bleeding on the kitchen linoleum. "I don't _know_ why it won't close," he growled to Buffy, who was wrapping his hand with a gauze bandage after he'd bled through the Band-aid that he shouldn't have needed.

"But shouldn't it...clot, or something?" she asked.

"Yes, Slayer, it should. But it's not."

"It's not even a big cut!" said Dawn. "It's teeny-tiny." And it was: just a quarter-inch slice across his palm from edge of the shelf he'd stumbled against, putting the knives away.

Buffy finished taping the cloth and said, "I think you should go to the clinic."

"It's nothing," he said. "Hardly even a paper cut."

"But it's a really drippy paper cut!" said Dawn. "And Dr. Stacey _said_..."

"Fine." He jerked his hand away from Buffy. "And seeing as your mum's run off with the car for the next three days, you were thinking to get there how?"

After some wrangling with the slurred male voice on the Harris line, they finally got Xander, who reported that yes, he could play Chauffeur of the Dead for the evening. Again.

Spike had called ahead, and gotten lucky -- Stacey had a spot open, which saved explaining the whole sordid fiasco to someone new. After a few minutes of Xander squirming in his chair and whispering too loudly about nothing, Stacey called Spike in. Buffy and Dawn followed, leaving Xander casting furtive glances over a magazine at the reception area's other, less human inhabitants.

After hefting himself up on the exam table -- two hundred and forty-three hours -- Spike thrust his bandaged hand at Stacey. "I can't stop bleeding."

She cut the now-damp bandage away and examined the cut, still welling crimson. She made him tell over again exactly how he'd gotten the cut. She asked about magic, but Buffy assured the shelving was 100% non-mystical Ace Hardware, on sale. After cleaning the wound, Stacey sealed it shut with medical glue. Then she swiveled and tapped on a laptop for a bit.

Finally she turned back. "I can't be sure, but I think there's some...friction between your mystical and natural physiology."

"'Friction,'" Spike said. "That's highly technical, right there."

"I can't be any more specific; I'd need to do some fairly invasive tests to find the exact cause. But vampires aren't whole creatures to begin with. You're human and demon, natural and supernatural stitched together with some old-fashioned blood magic."

"Half-breeds," Spike suggested.

She winced, and he recalled that that term likely struck rather closer to home for her. "If you like. The point is, I think your hosting apparatus is starting to burst those ritualized seams. I'd guess it has something to do with how it's redirecting the blood you ingest. Maybe the filtered blood lacks some mystical nutrient, or maybe your metabolic system is finally reacting to all this foreign matter you have in you. I'm not really surprised. I think the fatigue and the tremors you talked about are probably symptoms, too."

"So I'm falling apart," Spike said carefully, and wondered how the words could sound so steady. Vulnerability to sunshine and toothpicks was one thing, but this disintegration from within? "Today I'm not healing, and tomorrow I've got bits dropping off."

"Possibly," she said. "But not if we stop things in time. I suspect your biomystical system will repair itself once we extract the hosting apparatus and contents."

It took longer to process that than it should. "You mean, get her out."

"I do," she said. "Ten days early isn't considered premature. It's not even terribly unusual. She should be fine."

A deep breath; a glance to Dawn, who was wide-eyed with blooming delight, and then to Buffy -- and when had he started looking to Buffy for reassurance?

"When?"

"As soon as we can manage it. Give me a few minutes to call around -- I'll see where Dr. Einjarl is on his circuit. If he's not available in the next day or two I'll send you into L.A."

She left, and the three looked at each other.

"So, you're going to have her soon?" said Dawn. "Like, tomorrow?"

"I guess so," he said. This was good news and not bad, and he was having as much trouble getting his breath now as before. He gripped the edges of the exam table and began recalculating the hours.

Stacey strode in a few minutes later. "Dr. Einjarl will be at the Oak Hollow clinic tomorrow, and I've scheduled you for a post-sunset surgical appointment. They have a few beds, so you'll be able to spend the day and they can keep an eye on your healing, in case it doesn't improve right away after everything is removed. They'll also handle the birth certificate and all the usual documentation."

"So she'll be legal and everything?" Buffy said. "A U.S. citizen?"

"The papers are legal papers," Stacey said. "I wouldn't look too closely at the ruling that allows the clinics to issue them. But yes, legal and everything."

"Figures," said Spike. "Go to all this trouble having a baby, and she winds up a Yank."

~*~*~

When they got home, there were calls to be made. It turned out the witches wanted to come, over Spike's protests, and of course Buffy and Dawn were, too, which necessitated a discussion of whether another car was needed or if all those tiny females could squeeze in the back seat of Xander's rattletrap. By the time it was done Spike still wasn't sure what the conclusion had been. Then a call to Joyce, during which she admonished and scolded -- for his gall at having a baby without her -- and reassured.

Buffy made a meticulous inspection of his hand. The glue Stacey had slathered it with seemed to be holding.

Group project. That was him.

But finally the what-abouts and what-ifs slowed to a trickle. "I'm going to bed," he said. Dawn's mouth cracked open. "Alone," he added, too knackered/edgy/_everything_ to care about softening the words. She frowned, but Buffy gave her a Significant Look and she quieted.

He shut the basement door and stumped down the stairs. By the glow of the nightlight he passed a last glance over the crib, at the tidy stack of sleepers in their shelf, at the diapers Joyce had helped him choose. Then he stripped down to a fresh pair of sweatpants and sat unsteadily on the mattress.

He breathed slowly, deeply, taking in the faux-lemon of Joyce's all-purpose cleaner and, beneath it, the rich taste of earth on the air, dulled though it was by the newly installed humidifier. The part of him that had never quite escaped the grave was soothed by that fragrance of stone and soil. He was glad his girl would grow up knowing it.

He slid his hands over the broad, impossible swell of his belly. Uncomfortable, yes. Bloody inconvenient. Give him six months, and he'd surely be repulsed by this memory of himself, swollen and misshapen and stripped of the comfortable masculine certainty that such a thing could never, ever happen to him. But for one more night -- twenty-two hours -- this was where his little girl was, and much as he wanted to see her he couldn't begrudge them both these last few quiet moments before the world turned over.   
The door above creaked. Footsteps descended, slow, irregular. Shoes appeared: not Dawn's sneakers, but a pair of Buffy's heeled leather slaying boots. Her head ducked around the frame and her gaze found him in the semi-dark. "You're awake," she said softly. She trotted down the rest of the stairs and came to stand before him, arms crossed awkwardly. "I didn't mean to interrupt."

"No?"

She didn't appear certain that she'd meant to come at all. "I was about to go patrol. I came to, um, see if you needed anything."

He gave that a long moment's thought, and then planted his hands behind him and said, "I don't suppose I do."

A pause, while intently regarding a possible scuff on her shoe. Then, facing him, "This is never going to stop being weird, is it?"

"'This'?" His girl was waking up; he could feel her starting to squirm.

"You, with a baby, in my house."

For a bare instant he let in the whole view at once: him under the Slayer's roof raising up a human chit of a thing he'd carried himself. "Doesn't seem likely, does it? Expect you might quit noticing after a while."

"I guess."

"And you'll be back at university any week now, yeah?" He braced against a half-hearted kick to his spine.

"Well, but I have to come back and visit the Spike-baby, don't I?" She reached out and gave his stomach a furtive pat.

"Wouldn't have figured you for the squalling infant type."

She considered. "I'm not, really. But I feel sort of responsible for this one. Especially if she's a--"

"No," he said sharply. "She's human, and that's all she is."

"But if--"

"_No_." He stared her down until her gaze dropped. She licked her lips, her weight shifting to turn, and he said, "Do you want to feel her?"

She stared, a Slayer caught in the headlights. "Not really," she muttered.

"S'not like you haven't touched us before -- what was that bit about saving her from the dorkiness?"

"That was different," Buffy said.

He arched an eyebrow.

"I wasn't thinking about it then."

He swallowed a laugh at this girl who'd faced down any number of the world's more revolting demons and yet was spooked by _him_. By this. "I've seen your fingers twitching at your sides when you're trying not to look at me."

"They do not twitch!" She hid them behind her. "No twitchiness here."

"Give us your hand," he said, offering his. When she still hesitated, he added, " S'almost your last chance, you know."

She stared a moment more, and then she abruptly took the one step between them, settled next to him on the bed, and held her hand out, hovering uncertainly just above his stomach. He pressed it flat against himself and heard the sharp intake of her breath -- just from the heat of him, he supposed, since his girl had chosen that moment to fall still.

"You know," Buffy said, eyeing his stomach critically with just a hint of a smirk at the corner of her mouth, "You felt way different when we were engaged. "

He stiffened against the reminder of those few mawkish, treacherous hours he'd put determinedly behind him.

"_Oh_," she said, and a startled giggle snuck out.

"What?" he snapped.

"I was going to marry you, and you were already pregnant with some other woman's kid." A string of giggles burst from her. "I didn't..." Snort. "I didn't even ask if there'd been anyone else."

Relaxing, he started to grin. "Well, you know. Harm."

"Harmony!" That seemed to make it worse. "Do you think she'd make an honest vampire of you, if you told her?"

"Suppose she might." Straightening, he said gravely, "Didn't you know? It happens this way sometimes, with vampires."

"Oh, God." She had a joyous sort of beauty when she laughed like this, with abandon. He chuckled with her until the breathless mirth fell silent.

It was then that Buffy apparently noticed where her hand was still lying. She tensed to pull away, and it came: a drowsy shove against her palm. "Oh," she breathed. "Hey, kid," she said, stroking his skin with her thumb.

Then came that deep, full movement that felt like a boulder rolling over inside him. Buffy glanced up, wide-eyed. "Does she do that a lot?"

"Less now than she used to. Not much maneuvering room in there anymore."

She withdrew and planted her hands on the edge of the bed. "And the weirdness just doesn't stop."

He paused for one of those now-necessary breaths. "Slayer?" She glanced up, and for one single moment he loosened his white-knuckled grip of certainty. "Slayer, if she is..."

She looked him in the eye, solemn. "We'll deal."

"Right." He sighed, looking down at the mound that was his little girl. No one would bother her as long as he had her inside. But once she was out...

He felt a touch: Buffy's hand, warm against his arm. "We'll figure it out. Okay?"

This time he nodded. "Okay."


	25. Chapter 25

In three hours, or maybe three and a half, depending on medical bureaucracy, he'd get to see her. Or possibly never, if certain people didn't get a move on. "Oy! Not getting any thinner, here!" Spike called from just inside the Summers threshold. It was only minutes until sundown, but the last he'd seen of Buffy, she had the phone stuck to her ear and still a good half-hour's primping to go. Xander hadn't even made an appearance yet.

Dawn walked unhurriedly out of the dining room, a camera in hand. "Mom called. She says we have to get pictures."

"Oh. Good." As if he were going to ever forget his first glimpse of her, once he finally got it.

"Of you, stupid." She waved the camera at him.

"Of... You bloody well are not!"

"But you have to have evidence!"

"Of what? Me bein' a government experiment? Serial code seventeen, not to mention whole stacks of computer files. There's your evidence."

"For the baby," she said with that peculiarly teenaged superiority. "When she asks where she came from, what are you going to tell her?"

He looked blankly at Dawn. Tell... her? About this?

"You have to show her something. So smile."

He scowled. "I am _not_..."

Dawn rolled her eyes. "Buffy, is Mom still on the phone?" she called, wandering off.

"Give it up," Xander said, walking in the front door, keys dangling from his finger. "You know you'll do whatever they want."

Spike sighed and pressed the heel of his hand into the foremost ache in his back. Enough with last night's treacley sentiment; the moment he had his body to himself again couldn't come too soon.

"He won't let me," said Dawn, wandering in again with the phone to her ear. "Yeah. Here he is." She thrust the phone at him.

"Joyce?" he muttered into the mouthpiece. "Look--"

"Still gorgeous," she said.

"You... Bloody..." It was a family conspiracy. Had to be. His sputter turned to a laugh. "I'm not doing that Demi Moore thing, you understand me?"

"You'd better not," she said. "It's my daughter taking the pictures."

He laughed again. "All right. All right. Bloody women."

"Take care, Spike."

Her heartfelt tone gave him a moment's pause before he managed, "Yeah. Will do."

When he'd clicked the phone off, Dawn was waiting, camera still in hand. "So?"

He sighed. "Where do you want me?"

The pictures as eventually taken had Spike on the couch, a Summers girl on each side. The first shot was relatively solemn -- damn near a family portrait, whispered a mental voice -- but by the second Dawn was gesturing bunny ears behind his head and camera-wielding Willow was telling him to 'ham it up.' And Spike, almost a father and sandwiched between girls grinning at him, obliged. By the end he had his arms along the back of the couch, properly nonchalant about the three girls crowded around him -- Tara had arrived -- with their hands patched across his stomach and their 100-watt smiles turned to the camera.

"Pretty sure I don't want to know how those turn out," he said afterwards. "Now, can we go already? I want to see my baby girl."

They were the magic words, it seemed. They all piled into the one car -- apparently convenience had overruled the need for seatbelts and a second vehicle -- and pulled onto Revello just after the last glint of sunset dropped behind the hills.

Scenery slid past the window: dry, knotty scrub; oaks bent and wind-twisted, like spooks flailing in the dark. He'd almost forgotten there was a world beyond Sunnydale; beyond, even, the smothering little two-story on Revello.

Behind him, the girls chattered about the pictures, about him, about the surgery. Somewhere along the way someone had convinced Willow and Dawn that they did not, in fact, need to attend the actual slicing-open, but the girls were adamant about seeing his little one at the very first possible moment, once she was born.

He knew the feeling.

"You ready for this?" asked Xander, his eyes still following the stark white-black road stretching ahead.

Spike gave a harsh chuckle. "What do you think?"

After a pause, Xander said, "I think I'd be quaking under the bed about now."

"Yeah, well, I don't really fit under there anymore."

A snort and flickered glance, and then the sort of good-humored grin that, six months ago, Spike would have bet he'd never prod out of a Scooby. Turned out, all it took was getting knocked up. "So this is it?" Xander asked. "Parenthood ho?"

Spike took a deep breath. "Looks like."

Silence then, as they drove into the outskirts of a small, comfortable town of the picket-fence variety. Also of the demon variety, for those who saw the Lira'ashihal clan symbols woven into the dreamcatchers and the scrawl of Shirakanian burnt over the doorways. Spike had heard of Oak Hollow; it was a town with too few humans and too much mostly-but-not-always-pacifist muscle for a vamp to bother with.

"We've got about ten minutes," Xander said. "Assuming I'm looking at this map right side up."

Ten minutes. Maybe an hour of waiting and prep. The time under the knife. And then...

"What about her name?" Dawn asked, again. Spike turned to tell her, again, that he had to see the girl first.

In the space of an instant, a shot broke the night behind them and Xander's left rear tire shuddered and blew. Dawn screamed as the car fishtailed, fighting Xander's grip on the wheel while the tire thump-thumped beneath them.

"Not _now_," Spike ground out, dropping his arms around his belly. Not when he almost had her. And she was so _fragile_...

"They're behind us!" said Willow. "I think they're vamps."

"Vamps with guns?" Xander cried. "That's not fair!"

Spike twisted far enough to look around the headrest, and by the light of the street lamps could just see a jeep with a rifle sticking out the passenger window. A fanged figure stood in the back, black robe flapping madly behind.

"Bloody _hell_."

"What? What?" said Xander, hands in a deathgrip. "I'm supposed to be decelerating, here!"

"It's that bloody cult." His breath was ragged in his throat. "They're after us. Me and her."

"There's more of them," called Willow. "A couple more cars, at least. Xander, they're gaining!"

"Can you get us to the clinic?" Buffy said from just behind Spike's ear, her voice sharp and low.

"Sure," Xander said shakily. "Right. _The Xandermobile's Last Stand_, coming right up."

Another shot. Dawn shrieked.

"Dawn!" cried Buffy.

"I'm okay, I'm okay. Sorry."

They roared unevenly toward an intersection. "Where now?" Xander yelled, thrusting the scrap of paper at Spike.

It took him a moment to right the map and get his bearings. "Right," he said, and then found himself gripping the door handle to keep from lurching into Xander's lap at the turn. "Wouldn't have thought this heap had that in it," he muttered.

"There!" Dawn pointed past Spike to a squat block of a building on the left. _Oak Hill Surgical Clinic_, read the sign.

Xander floored the car across the street and over the half-curb. Spike braced himself against the dash as they screeched to a stop by the door. "Come on, come on!" Xander pushed out of his door and pulled Dawn's open, gripping her by the arm and almost lifting her out.

And, _damn_ the puddle-jumper, Spike still couldn't get out his side. He glanced down the street to the intersection, the vamp jeep was just coming in sight. Then he grabbed the doorframe with both hands, pulled hard enough to wedge a foot under himself, and _shoved_.

Just as he reached the halfway point, Willow caught his flailing hand and pulled him the rest of the way out. "Come on!"

Ahead of them, Buffy paused. "Xander," she said, "get Spike and Dawn inside, somewhere safe. Defensible." She looked back the way they'd come, where vampire roars floated faintly over the gunning of engines. "And then I'm gonna need your help. Willow--"

Spike, Dawn, and Xander scrambled for the door. "We can help, too," Willow was saying.

Another shot.

"Buffy!" Dawn's twisted to see.

"Sis'll be fine," he said, though he wasted a glance behind him just to be sure. Dawn didn't say anything, but she grabbed his arm and held it as they pushed through the door. Spike staggered to a stop, breath heaving, to take a long, full sniff of the premises. "Not in here yet," he told Xander. From the sound of the yelling outside, the vamps had been intercepted, but who knew how long it'd take one or two to break through.

Hard on the heels of that thought, a vamp barreled straight through the doorpane in a spray of glass. The demon at the reception desk shrieked an earsplitting Lira'ashihal shriek. Xander stepped in front of the vamp, a stake in hand. "Get out of here!" he yelled over his shoulder.

"C'mon, Niblet," Spike said urgently, pushing her toward the door at room's end. Behind them came a yell like Tarzan with a chest cold, and then a grunt and the crash of breaking terra cotta.

Spike was halfway through the door when a grip fell on his shoulder, steeled with zeal and certainty. The grip pulled him back through the door and he bashed his hand on the frame as he twisted. "Coming at me from behind?" he said, dropping an elbow over his stomach. He threw a punch at the yellow eyes and connected, but the vamp barely staggered. "Coward. No honor among vamps, is that it?" Spike stumbled backward, one fist up, fangs falling and ready. He just needed the vamp to take one more step...

"Arrrrgh!" yelled Xander. He jumped the vamp, or tried, but vamp shoved him off and he slammed chest-first into the wall. It threw the vampire off its stride, though, just long enough for Spike to give it one full door-slam in the face.

"Move it!" he told at Dawn. In seconds she'd sprinted halfway down the hall, with him lumbering behind. "Hey, but stay with me!" he yelled. "Can't have you walking into anything without me," he said -- for however much protection he'd be.

Joyce: _If it was a question of saving your daughter or saving Dawn, which would you choose?_

No. _No_. Not going to happen.

He pushed on, alert for sounds of carnage behind them or a door shoved violently open. "We just need a small space somewhere, no windows, no vents if we can help it." He hadn't had good luck with vents.

"They're locked," Dawn said, twisting at one doorknob and then another.

"Bloody... Here, stand still." A hand on her shoulder for balance, he aimed a sharp kick at a solid, unmarked door. Then another kick. At the third, the lock wrenched free of the doorframe and the door swung into someplace still and dark.

"Spike!" Dawn yelled, terrified eyes looking past him.

The same grip from before fell on Spike's arm. As he twisted he took a blow to the shoulder that he'd have shrugged off six months ago and staggered under now. He kicked at the new vamp's knee and connected. The vamp roared.

Half-recovered, Spike turned, putting up his fists and trying to settle into twelve decades' hard-earned instincts, muddled as they were. But he had a vulnerability the size of England; he was bloody _nine months pregnant_.

The vamp's foot swept behind Spike's ankle and Spike hit the gleaming tile floor. The vamp towered over him. Before Spike could roll aside the vamp stomped onto Spike's upper arm, pinning him. Spike shoved against the floor, trying for purchase, but the vamp only shifted his weight and lifted the other foot, an instant away from bringing that massive booted heel down on Spike's belly.

Suddenly, silent, miraculous, Dru's pretty wooden knife went spinning over Spike's head and straight home into the ugly bastard's half-robed chest. For one eternal half-second the vamp's foot hung in the air inches above Spike, and then he dissolved, coating Spike in dust.

"Come on!" Dawn pulled at him, and he scrambled far enough upright to follow her through the door and slam it shut behind him.

The room was pitch black now, too dark even for vamp eyes. He flipped the light switch and then scanned the room, filled with shelves and tall metal cabinets. "Here," he said, putting his shoulder to the cabinet nearest the door. A moment later Dawn was next to him, and together they heaved it crashing in front of the door. With a last shove, they shifted it even with the wall.

"Oh, bloody hell," he said. He heard the gasp in his voice and finally realized how heavily he was breathing. His knees felt as though they'd give at any moment. He leaned back against the wall, and slumped -- cautiously, one hand out to break his fall -- to the floor.

"Spike!" Dawn was at his side, her hands heavy and urgent on his arm, which probably meant he should open his eyes. "Spike, are you okay?"

"Been better," he grunted.

"Is _she_ okay?"

She...?

After one instant of utter panic, he found her heartbeat, as steady as always. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, she's all right."

It was quiet now, inside the room and out. Whatever battles were being fought, their sounds didn't make it this far in.

"So did you see?" said Dawn. "Did you see it? I slayed him. I slayed the vampire!"

"That you did," he mumbled.

"All by myself," she added.

He lifted his eyelids open and managed a twisting of the lips that she might take for a smile, if she liked. "Suppose my getting a kick in doesn't count?"

"Well..." Her brow furrowed as she considered the possible injustice of this assessment, and he relented.

"All by yourself," he said.

"Yeah," she said, triumphant and glowing. "I totally did. And I rescued you."

He swallowed as the truth of it hit. "Us."

"Yeah," she repeated, a little less certain this time. She drew her legs to her chest and peered over her bony denimed kneecaps. The focus of her gaze shifted, unseeing, to somewhere in the middle distance.

He dropped his hands to his belly. "Sorry about the jostling, love," he murmured. He took a breath and held it, letting the rest of his awareness fall away until he could feel that flutter ease all through him. His 'heartbeat' was right. It was his whole life's rhythm, now. Stop the one and you might as well stop the other.

But not yet. Please, not yet.


	26. Chapter 26

The thrill of that explosion of dust had faded. Now Dawn huddled against the supply-room wall, and it felt like her bones had frozen and would never thaw. She didn't think it was just a temperature problem. It wasn't the killing part -- that, she was totally okay with. If every one of the vamps out in the parking lot got staked right this minute, then Go Team Buffy. It was the part before, with the eyes and the fangs and the certainty that he was _going to eat her_.

Except he hadn't, because she had killed him dead -- or, okay, deader. _She_ had killed _him_. Take that, vamps.

She had sort of thought, all those basement evenings with Spike, that if she could just slay one stupid vampire then she wouldn't be afraid of them anymore. Not, it turned out. 'Cause she thought about the way the vamp had _snarled_, just like the one she'd sort of almost knuckled in the chin, months ago, and she was still cold and shaken.

Spike didn't look any better off than her. His ragged breath hadn't evened out to normal, even his weird kind of normal, and he had one hand pressed against his stomach like he didn't dare let it fall. As he lifted the other hand, bloodied, to his mouth, she saw tremors.

"You're shaking."

A pause, while he finished licking the first knuckle. "Yeah."

"Does it hurt really bad?" Did _what_ hurt, she wasn't sure; she hadn't thought the other vampire had done any real damage.

He sighed -- a deep, weary sort of sigh, almost a groan. "S'not that. Just did too much running about, is all. And I haven't eaten anything in a while."

"Oh." She pushed to her feet. "Maybe we can find something in here." She'd barely given a glance to the metal-gray rows of industrial shelving, but now she would. It was for Spike, and it was something different than fangs, and those were two very good reasons.

Another sigh. "Dawn..."

"They fix lots of vampires here, right?" she said. "They have to keep blood somewhere." But not on this aisle, apparently. Boxes of latex gloves on one side and syringes on the other, _not_ what she was looking for. Didn't need the bags of cotton swabs on the next aisle, or the sealed rows of canvas tape.

She could hear Spike against the far wall, still gasping at every breath. She walked faster, scanning for... well, where did she think they kept the blood, in soup cans? At the far end she turned left and walked the perimeter, looking for a fridge. She came to Spike and passed him. When she'd circled the whole room and come to him again, she said, "Sorry. I guess it's somewhere else."

"I figured," he said. He tapped his ear. "No appliances running in here."

Shoot. Dawn slid to the floor next to him. All this medical stuff, and no blood?

Except...

Dawn thought about Spike slumped and shaking. Also about the baby, who maybe needed feeding sooner than Spike could manage just now. And about bruising fingers, and pinching, and fangs.

"I want to see it again."

He slitted an eye open.

"Your face. The other one. I want--" didn't want, really didn't want, would rather forget all about, but if she was going to do this _had_ "--to see it again."

"Another time, pet," he said, and the exhaustion in his voice was almost enough to make her shut up and let him be worn out in peace.

Almost. "Please?"

He regarded her a moment, silent, not quite still. Then he lifted his chin just a little, and his brow dropped thick and heavy. His nose thickened too, and under his nose was his mouth, and in one corner of his mouth was a glint of fang. But worst was how the familiar sharp blue of his eyes melted to yellow, which was way scarier than anything to do with forehead or fangs.

She swallowed, heaving thin shallow breaths. "I like the other one better," she said.

"Is that right," he said, and she thought he sounded amused. She hoped.

"You don't have any eyebrows now," she said. "I can't tell what you're thinking."

He choked a laugh, grinning, which meant now she could see _lots_ of fangs. He must have realized it; he sobered, and his mouth fell almost shut.

Yeah. Still a vampire. And still her friend.

"I have blood," she said.

His head snapped up, yellow eyes already brighter and roving over her like she had a jar of it stuffed in her jeans pocket. Then he caught her meaning, and the hopeful light faded. "Yeah, and it's going to keep on running merrily in your veins where it belongs."

"People give blood all the time. It's no big deal."

"Look, even if I were even thinking about it -- which I'm not -- I couldn't, anyway. Chip."

"But what if I cut myself, just to get it started? You can suck blood, right? You just can't bite." She looked around for something sharp, but all she could think of were the syringes. "Does vampire saliva have germs?"

"I'm not going to eat my Niblet," he said firmly. When had he started calling her that again? "I promised. And I'm especially not going to eat her when she's scared."

"I'm not scared!"

"Are too."

"Am not!" Oh, right. Knives. She slipped the other one from her pocket and fumbled the strap open. Before she could think about it, she drew the point across her wrist -- crossways, of course, because everyone knew you only cut the other way if you wanted to get dead.

"Niblet!"

Fighting to keep her breath steady, she twisted and lifted her dripping arm up to his face. "See? Blood."

"_Get away from me_," he whispered. "A vamp's only got so much chivalry..."

"Just take it already," she said, letting the impatience in her voice shove out the other things. She thrust her wrist directly under his nose.

For a moment he stared past her arm, straight into her eyes. Then his gaze shifted, and the tilt of his head and the angle of his chin and all the reminders that this was _Spike_ disappeared, leaving only demon. Really hungry demon.

Faster than she could see, he gripped her arm with both hands and put his mouth to her wrist. His fangs pressed into her skin, and his eyelids fell shut as he began to pull the blood out of her. She held her breath just to focus on something besides jerking away as fast as she could. Finally she let it go, gasping a little, but he only gripped her tighter. Every so often she could feel his cool damp tongue licking at the wound.

Just when she started to think about being light-headed and wondered if maybe, just maybe, he'd forgotten whose arm he had, he thrust her away so hard she had to scramble to keep her balance.

"Niblet," he rasped, eyes closed, "if you ever do that again, I will drain you on principle."

She opened her mouth, but all she could make was a squeak. She swallowed, tried again. "Do you feel better?"

A pause, an exploratory roll of the shoulders. "Yeah."

"Then--" She lifted her chin, even though he couldn't see it. "Then I'm not sorry."

His eyes snapped open, blue again, and the look in them was so sharp that their color didn't really make her feel any better. He gave her a long, thorough glare. "You cheeky little bint," he said finally, and then she knew it was going to be all right. "C'mere, let's get you bandaged up." Just like that other time her arm had been hurt, he wrapped her in strips of t-shirt -- the one he was wearing, this time. "Now, saw a sink in here somewhere, yeah?"

She nodded.

"So go get some fluids in you."

She rose on shaky legs. On a shelf she found a box of plastic cups and filled one at the big industrial sink. After two refills, she carefully walked back, a little dizzy still. But, she reflected, Spike didn't look quite so miserable now that he'd eaten. He lifted an arm and she scooted under it.

_Then_ she started shivering.

"Knew you were scared."

Stupid body. "Maybe a little." A pause, while she considered all the other things there were to be scared of. "Spike?"

"Mm."

"D-do you think they'll be all right?"

" 'Course they'll be all right. Heroes and all." He shifted a little. "Dunno what you're worried about. It's not even the end of the world."

"And Xander?"

Just the briefest pause. "Boy's made of rubber. Has to be, if he's survived in the sidekick brigade this long. He'll be fine."

She couldn't help it. She slipped her arms around him -- even though it took a little stretching to find a part of him that was thin enough -- and buried her face in his shoulder. From the burning in her eyes she figured she was probably crying.

He stroked her hair, and she thought maybe she could fall asleep this way. At least part of him was warm.

Something bumped under her arm, and she sniffled a giggle. "So there really is a baby in there."

She could hear the grin in his voice. "It's not just a baby. It's my little girl. And I'm going to get her out."

Somehow, that eased the rest of the fearful ache. She snuggled in closer. Her arm stung a little inside the t-shirt wrapping, and she thought there'd probably be a bruise tomorrow.

It was worth it, though.

She shut her eyes and matched his breaths, shuddering and irregular, with hers.

~*~*~

Banging. Metal and banging and voices, vaguely familiar. Spike swam up from some dark, bottomless dream. As he shifted, bright jabs of pain chased up and down his back. There was a weight on his shoulder: Dawn, asleep.

"Dawn? Spike?" The voice was muffled, but the sharpness was all the Slayer's.

"Here," he called, but the words stuck dry in his throat. He shook Dawn loose. With one hand to the wall and one to the floor, he managed to heave himself to his feet. God, he ached. Bloody tile.

At the door, he tried calling again. "Slayer?"

"Spike!" The doorknob rattled. "Are you guys okay? Can you get this door open?"

He regarded the cabinet, shoved against the door by adrenaline and terror. "Give us a minute." It took some brute determination, but eventually he shifted it far enough away to give the Scoobies on the other side some leverage. The door scraped open and Buffy stormed through. "Are you guys all right? Where's Dawn?"

"Asleep," he said. "And we've been worse." Although not much worse; all the good of Dawn's hot-rich-_fresh_ blood had long since been used up, it felt like. Now, upright, he was starting to feel light-headed. "What of the vamps on a mission?"

"Dust," she said. "_All_ of them." Spike wondered at the vehemence in her tone.

Others filtered in: Willow and Tara, and then an orange, horned person with a stethoscope.

"And Xander?" He didn't actually care, he didn't, except... All right, so he did. It's what came of fraternizing with the enemy; made you weak and let you get all _attached_.

"He's getting fixed up right now," Buffy said. "With enough bandages to be our own Sunnydale mummy."

Damn. He'd have to be grateful to the boy now. Again.

"What about Spike-baby?" asked Buffy.

He lifted an eyebrow. "Still here."

"Good." She closed in and pressed a hand against his belly. A benediction, maybe. Or a promise. "Good."

"Uh, Slayer," he said, and then clutched heavily at her shoulder as his knees gave.

She followed him down, easing his fall. A moment later the medical person was at his side, peering into his eyes, prodding at his chest, and asking questions needing much more energy than he had. Fortunately, Buffy knew enough answers to satisfy, it seemed.

"So, convinced now?" she asked finally. "Not postponeable."

The demon made a noise of assent and then rose, calling in sharp, barking voice, "Let's get that room prepped!"

"Room for what?" Spike said, frowning up at Buffy.

Her lips quirked. "For the baby-having."

Oh. _Oh_. "Bloody hell." He closed his eyes to take in the shock of it.

After that, it was too much trouble to open them again. So he didn't.

~*~*~

His nose tickled with the sharp acridness of medical sterility. Somewhere distant, heels clicked importantly against tile floor. Nearer by were the little rustlings and rhythms of live bodies at ease, scented of someone familiar. And within...

Stillness, silence. Death.

Nothing.

He woke gasping. Eyes not even half-focused, he shoved himself upright and then cried out at the mess of blades and acid ripping through his stomach.

"Spike!" Firm hands pushed him back onto the bed. Green eyes peered into his, half-amused and edged with concern. "I told them we should have tied you down," she muttered.

"Is he okay?" came another voice. Over him another face loomed, framed by long chestnut hair that fell nearly into his eyes.

Face and scent and name connected. "Dawn?" And then the other one. "Slayer?"

Buffy straightened. "Comma, the. How's the post-op vamp?"

"Is she all right?" Because she was gone and her heartbeat was, too. It was the first time in seven months he'd been without it. "She's not... I don't..." Now he could feel the bandages swathing his middle and pulling at his chest. "Where is she?"

Buffy shrugged. "She's getting shots or a check-up or something. I don't know. She'll be back soon."

"You let them just walk off with her?"

"Tara went, too," Dawn said. "But we didn't, in case you woke up."

"So take me there," he said. He dropped one leg over the side of the bed and gritted his teeth as the motion pulled at the wounds -- stitches? -- in his belly.

"Hold it, buster." Buffy rested a hand on his chest. "You're the one with the major abdominal surgery. How's about we let the baby come to you."

"I'll go tell them you're awake!" Dawn said, turning and charging from the room like a teenage girl on a mission. Spike wondered how long she'd been sitting there, fidgeting, waiting for him.

Under the weight of Buffy's hand, he sank shakily back against the pillows. He didn't even protest when she hoisted his foot back under the hospital blanket. "But she's all right," he said, just to hear the words.

Buffy shrugged. "They say birth is a pretty traumatic experience, especially when, you know, it's an emergency c-section on a vampire with imminent collapse issues." She settled near his feet on the bed. "But she looked okay to me. Entirely baby-like."

"So you saw her."

A roll of the eyes. "Yes, Spike, I saw her."

"Speaking of collapse issues..."

"You'll be okay," she said. "They think. It sounds like Dr. I Am the Walrus got all the Initiative gadgets out, so some more blood and you'll be bad as new, oh yay. Except for the breathing thing, which I guess you're stuck with, since it's because of the chip."

He shrugged, and then winced at the twinges in his chest. "There are worse souvenirs."

"I guess," she said.

After a few moments of silence, he ventured, "Slayer?" But it was the wrong word now. Had been for a while, but he hadn't wanted to admit it. "Buffy."

Gaze enquring, lips pursed, she waited. _What's he going to come up with **now**_, she was wondering; it was written all over her face.

After a moment's struggle for words, he said finally, "Thanks."

"Hey, no biggie." Buffy smiled softly, her feet swinging against the bedframe. "This is what I do. Stake the bad guys and save the... good guys." The smile quirked. "And sometimes other people, too."

A person, now, was he? He'd have to let that admission roll around in his head awhile.

Buffy glanced past him, her lips parting in a grin. "Hey, look," she said. "Here comes another souvenir now."

He turned.

Coming in the door were Tara and Dawn, and with them was a delicately green-hued woman in scrubs, and in the woman's arms was a small, yellow bundle. "About time you woke up," the woman said. "Would you like to meet your daughter?"

Spike pushed himself upright, ignoring his own gasps of pain. The woman walked to his bedside and lowered her burden into his arms, shifting them into a position that suited her. The cloth was soft as gauze against his skin, the weight barely a breath. He caught a glimpse of nose, squashed and red.

"You sure this one's mine?" he said, breaking the burble of voices around him. "No mix-ups." Because how could he tell if _this_ was who'd been kicking at his ribs so long? And he knew, with the sliver of brain still functioning, that as soon as he really saw the tiny form in his arms he'd be lost.

The green woman smiled at him, bemused. "We don't get many human babies here."

Right, then.

He took a breath. Carefully, finally, he looked at his little girl.

She was the color of a day-old bruise, with a face pinched shut and crescents of gingery hair wisping from her skull. She had fists the size of his thumbs and fingernails like flower petals. Her veins raced with blood pressed on by that long-familiar flutter.

She was the whole world.

She was his.

"Hello, love," he whispered. "I've been waiting for you."

 

_Finis_


End file.
